


Empty

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abduction, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Forced Mating Bite, M/M, Major Character Death is not Stiles or Derek - Freeform, Mpreg, Not Canon Compliant, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 33
Words: 48,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7131875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jordan Parrish is the new sheriff of Beacon Hills, a town haunted by its past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Empty House

**Author's Note:**

> Most people have probably read this first chapter as part of my Word Soup collection. As always, I have no idea where this story is going, but it's already proving to be not a narrative so much as a non-linear collection of snapshots. Nobody panic. This might work... *shifty eyes* 
> 
> A note on the Major Character Death tag:  
> It's okay, it's not Sterek. It's also not the Sheriff, or Parrish.
> 
> A note on content: there is no rape in this story so I haven't used that tag, but it is very heavily implied that's what's going to happen, so some readers might be triggered by that.

 

The job doesn’t come with the house, but that’s how it works out. The former sheriff mentions offhand that he’s selling the place, and Parrish, because he’s still living out of a suitcase in a hotel, asks what he’s expecting for it. An hour later, after checking the place out, they shake on the deal.

It’s a big house for a single guy, but the price was good.

Feels a little weird, taking Stilinski’s job and his house, but if Parrish is honest with himself this whole situation feels weird. He’s not even thirty, and he’s Sheriff of Beacon Hills. It only took a Google search to figure it out. The job is a poison chalice. Four years ago someone set a bomb off in the station, killing eight deputies. And that was just the bloody end to years of unsolved cases. Not just little stuff either. Attacks, arsons, murders. Beacon Hills is a pretty town, but it’s seen a lot of unexplained bloodshed.

But Parrish was drawn here.

Mostly for the change in pace, despite the town’s recent history. It’s sure as fuck not Afghanistan. It’s not L.A. either, where Parrish was a cop for five years after getting out of the army.

He put in for position of interim sheriff because he needed a change. And he’s got a year and a half until the election to prove himself to the residents. He still doesn’t understand why none of the Beacon Hills’ deputies wanted the job. Not really. Not until he meets Sheriff Stilinski.

The man’s friendly enough, but Parrish has seen that look before. The blank one. The one that Parrish is more used to seeing in the faces of the guys he remembers from the dusty plains of Helmand Province. Stilinski is a broken man.

It doesn’t take long for Parrish to figure out why. His kid’s name is in one of the many unsolved case files that land on Parrish’s desk his first day in the job. It explains the look in Stilinski’s eyes. It also explains the way he walked around the house before he handed it over to Parrish, his shaking hand lingering on windowsills, on walls, on the doorframe of the one empty room he didn’t step inside.

Parrish hopes Stilinski finds some peace now he’s put Beacon Hills behind him.

It takes a while to settle in. There’s a lot to learn about the town, and about running the department. The deputies are good though, and the admin staff saves his ass on more than one occasion when it comes to rosters, and meetings, and budgeting. Parrish goes into election year feeling like this is something he can do.

He works on the house on his days off. Gives it a fresh coat of paint inside and out. Strips the old carpet back to the floorboards and polishes them up. Renovates the bathroom. He makes friends and invites them around for backyard barbecues and football games. It’s good.

The house still feels too big though.

At the end of fall, a storm rolls through Beacon Hills. Parrish finishes work late. He stayed behind to help with traffic control when the lights went out on Main Street. When he gets home, he’s dripping wet. He parks the cruiser in the driveway, and heads inside. He showers and changes, and makes himself a sandwich for dinner. Then he heads upstairs and climbs into bed with a book.

He dozes, he thinks.

Wakes with a start when a branch scrapes against the side of the house in a wild gust of wind.

He checks his phone. It’s past midnight. No messages or calls from the station.

He reads another few pages of his book.

The storm is unsettling. Every noise seems unexpected, and out of place.

The scrape of branches, the rustling of leaves, the dull roar of the rain on the roof. Outside, the darkness is broken by jagged flashes of lightning. Thunder rumbles low and close.

There’s a strange tap-tap-tapping from somewhere. Parrish listens for a moment, but can’t figure out what it is. He reads the same paragraph in his book three times. And then something that sounds like a reedy wail rises through a break in the rain and the thunder.

Parrish climbs out of bed.

He’s halfway down the stairs when there’s another brilliant flare of lightning, and then the power goes out.

He hears the wailing again, coming from the back of the house.

Parrish heads for the kitchen, grabbing the flashlight off the top of the refrigerator.

Lightning illuminates the world for a brief moment, and that’s when Parrish sees the figure standing outside the kitchen window. He crosses to the kitchen door, holding the torch like a baton, and unlocks the door and pulls it open.

“Dad?” a thin voice asks. “Dad?”

 

***

 

The kid tries to run when he realizes, but Parrish grabs him by the arm. That’s when he sees the kid’s holding a toddler on his hip.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Parrish says. “Come inside. Come on.”

“No,” the boy says, his voice ragged. “No! Don’t touch me!”

He’s like a feral animal. Parrish is afraid if he lets him go, he’ll never see the boy again.

The toddler wails loudly when lightning cracks the sky again.

In that brief flash of light, Parrish sees the ghost of the former sheriff’s son in the too-thin face, in the dark eyes, in the mole-speckled skin.

“Stiles,” he says, and the kid flinches at the name. “It’s Stiles, right?”

“H-how…”

Parrish uses the kid’s confusion to corral him into the kitchen. To close the door behind him.

“My name is Jordan Parrish,” Parrish tells him. “I’m the sheriff.”

The kid hugs the wailing toddler tight. “Where’s my _dad_?”

“He retired,” Parrish says, and flinches when a sob escapes the kid’s throat. “He never stopped looking, Stiles, okay? I can call him. I’ll call him, okay?”

Stiles nods, and hides his face in the toddler’s dark curls as lightning illuminates the kitchen once again.

“You’re freezing,” Parrish says. “You must be. Come upstairs and I’ll get you some dry clothes.”

“I just want my dad,” Stiles mumbles.

“Daddy!” the toddler wails.

Omega.

The reports had said the Stilinski kid was an omega. That he’d probably been targeted because of it.

“You should put your son in something dry at least,” Parrish says.

At that moment, the lights flicker back on.

Jesus.

Stiles is a mess. He’s too thin, and there are bruises on his face and arms that Parrish didn’t see before. Dark circles under his eyes. And something that looks like claw marks on his throat. What the hell?

“Yeah,” he croaks. “Okay, yeah.”

Parrish leads him up the stairs.

He fetches a towel from the bathroom, and then goes into his bedroom to grab a warm hoodie for the toddler to snuggle in. He grabs his phone at the same time, and hopes Stilinski is still in his contacts.

When he comes back outside, the hallway is empty. He finds Stiles and the toddler in the spare room. It’s full of boxes and renovation supplies and tools. It’s the room Stilinski couldn’t walk into the day he left. Parrish doesn’t need to see the heartbreak on Stiles’s face to confirm this was once his bedroom.

“Hey,” he says, and hands over the towel.

The toddler wails when Stiles puts him down. Then, when Stiles gets on his knees to dry him, the toddler keeps trying to climb back into his arms.

Parrish leans in the doorway as Stiles undresses the toddler and then tugs the hoodie over his head.

“You warm now, baby?” Stiles asks, and the toddler dives back into his arms. Stiles holds the bunched-up towel between them, keeping the hoodie dry. There’s something in his expression as he gazes around the room. Something haunted, and hunted. Something almost cold. And then he closes his eyes, and for a moment he looks achingly vulnerable, as young as the teenager he was when he vanished five years ago. When he opens his eyes again, they’re shining. “Will you call my dad?”

Parrish nods, and unlocks his phone screen.

Stiles stands up, carrying the toddler on his hip again. He steps toward Parrish, and suddenly Parrish is holding an armful of wriggling toddler.

“His name is Ryan,” Stiles says. The hand he rubs over the toddler’s damp curls is thin and pale. “Tell my dad his name is Ryan Hale.”

Then Stiles kisses the top of the toddler’s head and shoves past Parrish.

Parrish fumbles with his phone and almost drops it. “What? Wait!”

Ryan begins to wail again.

Parrish hurries down the stairs behind Stiles. “Stiles, wait!”

For a second he thinks Stiles is going to listen. The way his shoulders tense, the way he almost stumbles to a stop before his footsteps are carrying him back toward the kitchen. Then he’s twisting the doorknob and wrenching the back door open.

“Stiles!” Parrish yells. “Stiles, where are you going?”

Where are you going?

Where have you been?

What _happened_ to you?

Stiles turns, silhouetted by a flash of lighting behind him that lights up the sky. “I’m going back for his father,” he says.

Ryan screams, reaching out his hands for Stiles.

“Stiles!” Parrish yells again.

But Stiles is already gone, a shadow in the night, swallowed by the storm, leaving nothing behind but an open door, wet footprints, and his screaming son.

The house has never seemed more empty.


	2. An Empty Chair

Stiles presents as an omega when he’s eleven. He’s an early bloomer, the doctor says. He says a lot of other stuff as well. Stiles isn’t really listening though, because the doctor has a chart of a skeleton on his wall, and Stiles is trying to count up all the bones and remember their names at the same time. There’s also a jar of jellybeans on the doctor’s desk, and Stiles has been thinking about those since he got here. Like, he knows he’s here for what his dad called a grown up examination, but he’s still a kid, right? Is there an age limit on those jellybeans? He wants a whole handful. The red ones are his favorite, but he likes the blue ones too. Not the black ones though. They taste bad. Whenever he has jellybeans at home, he picks the black ones out for his dad. Only adults like the black jellybeans.

He’s drumming his heels so hard against the side of the examination table that his dad has to put a hand on his knee to stop him.

Stiles looks at his dad, guilty, and sees an expression there he hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s the same look his dad had when they first found out about his mom. It’s fear.

Stiles bursts into tears because he thinks he’s going to die too.

It takes a lot of hugs from his dad, and a lot of jellybeans from the doctor, to convince him that he’s okay.

When they get in the car, his dad tells him that he’s not sad Stiles is an omega, but he’s sad that some people might treat him differently. And Stiles thinks that those words, more than anything that happened at the doctor’s, are what makes the examination a grown up one. He’s eleven, and the world isn’t what he thought it was. His life isn’t going to be what he thought it was. It’s not the first time everything has shifted so drastically, but this feels different because he’s not allowed to scream and cry and hate this. This isn’t something bad that’s happened to him, like when his mom died. This is who he _is_.

His dad says it’s special to be an omega. _Special_. Stiles thinks it’s Dad-speak for _freak_. Because Stiles doesn’t feel any different than he did before, but male omegas are rare. It’s like when everyone presents they’re put into different boxes. Stiles feels like he’s been put into a very small box, and it’s not really Stiles-shaped at all, so he has to squish himself up to make himself fit, and like all of a sudden there are all these rules and stuff. Like omegas are supposed to be quiet and polite and docile, and a hundred other things that Stiles isn’t.

Stiles has always been bad with rules.

It’s sort of funny.

This one time at school, Stiles and Scott pull the fire alarm just to see what happens.

What happens is they both get hauled up to the principal’s office, and Principal McClaren yells at Scott for twenty minutes, and makes Scott cry, and then he turns around to Stiles and says, “Well, I suppose I can’t blame you, Stiles.”

Which makes no sense, because it was totally Stiles’s idea, and also Principal McClaren has been rightfully blaming him for stuff since first grade.

It’s kind of funny, but also it’s kind of not. It makes him feel queasy in a way he doesn’t properly understand.

“Dad,” he says that night. “Are omegas stupid?”

“What?” his dad almost drops the casserole he’s getting out of the oven. “Why would you even ask something like that? You’re the smartest damn kid I know!”

“Me and Scott pulled the fire alarm at school, and only Scott got in trouble because I’m an omega,” Stiles blurts out.

His dad sets the casserole on the counter, and sighs. “Firstly, what the _hell_? You don’t go pulling fire alarms unless there’s a fire! Secondly…” He trails off them for a while, and his gaze settles on the empty third chair at the table. He gets that look in his eye like he’s seeing into the past. “Oh, Stiles.”

Stiles swallows around the lump in his throat.

“What omegas are, and what some people _think_ they are, are two very different things.” He sits down next to Stiles, the casserole forgotten for the moment. “Your mom was a beta, remember?”

Stiles nods.

“And I’m an alpha,” his dad says. “Now, there are a lot of people who think that means I was in charge of everything. You tell me, son, who was the boss of me?”

“Mom,” Stiles says with a tremulous smile.

“Damn straight she was,” his dad says firmly. “And there are people out there who think omegas are weaker, or quieter, or easily made to do things, or supposed to behave in one way only, and that’s _bullshit_.”

Stiles gapes at the rude word.

“It’s bullshit,” his dad repeats with a smile, and scruffs his hair. “You be you, Stiles. You be whoever the hell you wanna be.”

Stiles floods with warmth.

“Just…” His dad gives him a stern look. “Just don’t go pulling any more fire alarms, okay?”

“Okay,” Stiles grins, and dives in for a hug.

His dad gives the best hugs.

 

***

 

It takes a long time to get Stiles’s medication right. His ADD meds react with his heat suppressants, so for months he’s either climbing the walls, or he’s stumbling around like a zombie. It’s bullshit—that’s Stiles’s favorite word now, thanks to his dad—and he hates it, and he shouldn’t have to take stupid suppressants anyhow. He starts putting his suppressants down the bathroom sink instead of taking them. His dad only finds out when he gets home one afternoon to find Stiles shaking and crying under a cold shower as the pseudo heat tears through him. He ends up spending the night in hospital for observation, with his dad sleeping in the chair beside his bed, and the plush giraffe he hasn’t wanted in years tucked into the crook of his arm.

He always takes his suppressants after that.

His dad doesn’t even need to remind him.

 

***

 

When Stiles is thirteen, a woman in the grocery store tells him he shouldn’t hang around with that Scott McCall boy, because Scott is an alpha. Stiles is too shocked to say anything. She doesn’t even _know_ him. He goes home and cries himself to sleep that night.

 

***

 

His dad’s advice to be whoever the hell he wants to be means that by the time he’s fifteen Stiles has a reputation. He gets detention a lot in school, and the teachers don’t know what to do with him because he doesn’t fit neatly into that little omega box. He spends months growing his hair out, then shaves the sides and dyes the rest bright blue. He gets a lip ring that even his dad gives him the side eye about.

“Just being whoever the hell I want to be, Dad,” he grins, and his dad just huffs and scrubs his hand over his hair.

His chemistry teacher calls him a delinquent, and Stiles likes that label a lot more than _omega_. He’s not really a delinquent anyway. His dad is the sheriff. It’s not like Stiles is going to go stealing cars or whatever. He’s never even shoplifted. But people see the hair and the lip ring and the attitude, and they assume he’s worse than he is. Stiles doesn’t care. His dad knows the truth, and Scott does, and Scott’s mom does, and they’re the only people that matter to him really.

He’s fifteen. If he was an alpha or a beta, nobody would even notice him, but Stiles is _special_. He does the same things that any other kid his age does, but there’s no such thing as flying under the radar when he’s one of only a few male omegas in a small town.

Stiles doesn’t care. He’s making his own rules. He’s not going to be confined in the little box of other people’s expectations.

“Scotty!” he exclaims one night. “Scotty, I heard on the scanner they’ve found half a body in the woods! Let’s go see if we can find the other half!”

He’s fifteen and he’s brimming with the joy of being alive, of going on adventures, of doing things he shouldn’t do, and seeing things he shouldn’t see.

He’s fifteen and he’s _invincible_.

He’s fifteen, and he and Scott go out into the woods in the middle of the night.

They don’t come home.

 


	3. Empty Heart

Dawn comes creeping in cold and gray. Ryan cried himself to sleep hours ago, and is curled up in Parrish’s bed, the comforter tugged up to his nose. Parrish hasn’t slept since calling Stilinski. He’s not sure he’ll ever sleep again.

He stares out the back door into the yard. The woods encroach on the back fence. They seem dark today. Ominous, almost. The overnight storm has brought down a lot of branches. Water still drips from the leaves of the trees and soaks their trunks almost black. The storm is gone but the clouds still cling close.

Parrish calls the station, and gets one of the deputies to drop the unsolved case files off at his house when she finishes her shift. The boxes are dusty, and smell a little of damp.

“Anything much last night?” Parrish asks.

Tara shakes her head. “Nothing major. Some local flooding out on the highway, but no accidents.”

“Good.” Parrish gestures to his coffee machine. “You want one?”

“No thanks, Sheriff,” she says. “I’m gonna head home and get some sleep.”

“Okay.” Parrish nods at the boxes. “Thanks for these.”

She gives him a small smile as she leaves.

Parrish brews a coffee and stares at the file boxes on the kitchen table. Hell if he even knows where to start. Of course he’d read through the files when he’d taken over from Stilinski, and he’d paid particular attention to the ones about Stiles. He’d thought that maybe Stilinski had been too close to the case to investigate objectively, but he’d soon discovered that wasn’t true. Stilinski had been professional enough to recognize his own limitations from the beginning. He hadn’t run the investigation. Parrish can’t even imagine the restraint that must’ve taken, to step back and let others be in charge.

It’s just after six when Parrish hears the car pull up in the driveway.

He’s made good time.

Parrish opens the front door before Stilinski can even knock.

“What happened?” Stilinski asks.

“Sir,” Parrish says, and then starts again. “John, I don’t know. He was here, and then he was gone. Took off back into the woods.”

“You call out a search party?” Stilinski demands. There are more lines on his face than Parrish remembers. He looks like he hasn’t slept a night in years. Maybe he hasn’t.

“No.” Parrish doesn’t back down from the challenge in the man’s glare. “It was the height of the storm. Dog wouldn’t get a track.”

And it’s not like Beacon Hills has a K9 unit that works around the clock. They’ve got one guy with one dog, and Stiles would have had around an hour’s head start by the time he was called out and kitted up. That’s the reality of policing in a small town.

The reality is also staring a missing person’s father in the face and telling him that no, he didn’t do everything he could have, because he’d known it would be pointless. Parrish gets paid to make judgment calls like this everyday. Stilinski did too, once. That’s probably the only reason he doesn’t punch Parrish in the face right now.

“Come upstairs,” Parrish says.

Stilinski hesitates for a moment, and then follows him up the stairs. Parrish leads him to the main bedroom, and takes note of the way Stilinski’s fingers trace along the wall almost unconsciously, as though he’s remembering the dimensions of the house that was once his home. Brushing his fingers against the touchstone of his past.

Parrish left the door to his bedroom closed when he went down to the kitchen, less worried about Ryan waking up upset than he was about the toddler taking a tumble down the stairs. He opens the door quietly now, and steps aside so Stilinski can enter.

Ryan’s still asleep under Parrish’s comforter, wearing his hoodie like an oversized nightdress, with a towel spread under him in case of accidents. Except he’s somehow managed to wriggle off the towel, and is hugging it to himself with one clenched little hand. He’s sucking two fingers of his other hand in his sleep.

“Oh god,” Stilinski says, his voice cracking. Wonder and heartbreak battle for dominance in his expression. He gestures at the bed. “Can I—”

Parrish nods, not trusting himself to speak.

Stilinski moves forward, and scoops the toddler up into his arms. Holds him in a gentle hug as Ryan blinks himself awake. Cards his blunt fingers through those dark curls.

Ryan wriggles, and starts to wail. “Daddy? Daddy!”

“Shh,” Stilinski says. “Shh, kiddo. Daddy had to go. But Grandpa’s here. Grandpa’s got you.”

Ryan blinks up at him through tear-filled eyes, and then jams his fingers in his mouth again and regards him warily.

Parrish steps outside to give them a moment. He leans against the wall and closes his eyes, and feels the ghosts of John Stilinski’s past all around him. He shouldn’t be surprised. It’s their house, after all.

 

***

 

Parrish is in the kitchen when Stilinski enters with Ryan on his hip.

“I’m making breakfast,” Parrish says. “I don’t, ah, don’t know if I’ve got anything much for a little kid to eat. Oatmeal?”

“Thanks.” Stilinksi smoothes a hand over Ryan’s curls. “How many are you, kiddo?”

The question sounds nonsensical to Parrish, but Ryan pulls his fingers out of his mouth and studies his hand for a moment. Then he shows Stilinski his spitty index finger and his thumb.

“Two, huh? You’re almost a grown up.” Stilinski’s smile is strained and his voice is almost breaking again.

Ryan smiles back at him tentatively.

Stilinski takes a seat at the kitchen table, holding Ryan in his lap. His gaze falls on the boxes of files.

“I had them brought over this morning,” Parrish says. “Figured it was time to go through them again.”

“Yeah.” Stilinski closes his eyes for a moment, shoulders sagging as he exhales. “I shouldn’t have left. Should have been here for him.”

“You had no way of knowing he’d come back.” There’s no point in sugar coating it. “You had no way of knowing he was even still alive.”

“Shouldn’t have left.” Stilinksi clears his throat. “Those first few months, I used to think he’d just come walking back in the house one night like nothing had ever happened. People always say to you, don’t lose hope. But there’s the point where hope becomes your worst enemy. Where it drags you down even more than grief. Where you’re so damn tired of everything, you just wish you had a body you could bury. You just wish it was over.”

Parrish sets a bowl of oatmeal in the microwave. “You had no way of knowing.”

“My kid came back last night,” Stilinski says, “and I wasn’t here waiting.”

Parrish guesses that’s something the man’s going to torture himself with for a long time.

“Well, you can tell him you’re sorry when he comes back,” Parrish says. “In the meantime, I’d like to know where he’s been, and who’s been stopping him from coming home.”

Stilinksi clears his throat again, and nods. “Yeah. Me too.”

Parrish takes the oatmeal out of the microwave and sets it on the counter to cool while he fetches the milk from the refrigerator. “Stiles said his name is Ryan Hale. Now I know there’s files in those boxes that relate to the Hales. You think there’s any connection?”

“The Hale house fire,” Stilinski says. “Must have been ten years ago now. Killed most of the family.”

Parrish sets the oatmeal down on the table and hands a spoon to Stilinski. “The files on the house fire are in with your unsolved cases, even though the fire investigator signed off on it. Electrical fault.”

“That never sat right with me.” Stilinksi offers a spoonful of oatmeal to Ryan, and smiles when he opens his mouth for it. “Good job, kiddo. I don’t need to make any airplane noises for you, do I?”

Parrish smiles at that, despite himself.

John exhales heavily. “Jesus. I need to get him some clothes, I guess. And check into a hotel.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Parrish says suddenly. He shrugs. “If there’s nobody else in town you can stay with—”

Stilinski’s expression clouds, as though he’s thinking of someone specific. “There’s not.”

Parrish has read the files. He can make an educated guess.

“This house has got two bedrooms and I’m only using one.” Parrish sets a coffee down for Stilinski. “You and Ryan can have my room. I’ve got an air mattress in the garage I can use. I’ll set it up in the spare room.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Stilinski says, but Parrish knows he’s already decided. This is the house Stiles came back to. This is where Stilinski needs to be.

Stilinski nods, and then his expression shifts into something soft as he catches sight of the doorway leading into the hall. Parrish follows his gaze.

There’s a strip of old paint on the doorjamb, a section that for some reason Parrish couldn’t bring himself to cover up when he redecorated. Just a strip of eggshell blue, with black marks up the wall, and words written next to them:

_Stiles, age 1._

_Stiles, age 2._

_Stiles, age 3._

And all the way up to fifteen, when the marks suddenly stop.

John’s face cracks with a sudden smile. “He made us repaint it when he was five and decided he wanted to be called Stiles. You didn’t paint over it.”

“Didn’t feel right,” Parrish says. One last sign that a lost boy had ever lived. Parrish couldn’t bring himself to be the one who erased it.

He opens the kitchen drawer and digs around for a Sharpie. Tosses it to John who catches it with a look of surprise.

“If you want,” he says. “I’m gonna go take a shower.”

John nods.

Later, Parrish checks the doorjamb and runs his thumb gently over the newest mark there.

_Ryan, age 2._


	4. Empty Spaces

“Scott? Scott!”

Stiles is running. Always running. He thinks he’s been running for hours. Maybe he’s been running for a lifetime. Branches slap him in the face. Roots rise to trip him. He’s been turned around so many times he doesn’t even know which way is home.

He’s scared.

He’s never been so scared in his entire life.

He’s lost in the woods, and something is chasing him, and he’s lost Scott and—

His foot catches on a root, and he’s falling—

And then he’s awake, and he’s screaming Scott’s name.

 

***

 

He doesn’t know what happened.

He doesn’t know what’s happening.

He only knows that it’s dark and it’s cold and he can’t get out.

He thinks that maybe it’s been like this forever.

 

***

 

There are monsters in the world. Stiles doesn’t know how he never noticed it before.

He notices now.

He notices.

 

***

“No, dude, come on, it’ll be fun! _Pleeeeease_!”

Scott grins at him, his nose wrinkling, and yes, _awesome_ , this is a thing that’s going to happen.

“So whose body do you think it is?” Scott asks a few minutes later, clinging to his seatbelt as Stiles shifts down a gear to take a corner a little too fast. Stiles has only had the Jeep for a few weeks, and he’s not that great with shifting gears yet.

He grins at Scott. “No, Scotty, the better question is, which half did they find?”

Scott gives him a look. “Gross. You have a real morbid streak, you know?”

“Okay, so that’s fair, but also, how cool is it going to be when people at school find out we saw a dead body?”

That pulls an unwilling smile from Scott. “Yeah, it’ll be cool.”

 

***

 

Because it’s his fault.

Because he deserves this.

Because he dragged Scott out into the woods in the middle of the night, and Scott didn’t even want to go, and now he doesn’t know where Scott is, and he’s trapped and he can’t get out, and he’s going to die here, and monsters are real, monsters are real, monsters are real…

 

***

 

Scott’s dad is kind of a typical alpha dick. Stiles doesn’t really like him that much. He thinks that Scott probably doesn’t either, but he knows that’s not the sort of thing he’s supposed to say. Because Scott might not like his dad, but also he loves him, so it’s weird and confusing. Stiles likes his dad and loves him too, because his dad doesn’t care if he’s an omega, and he doesn’t think that makes him any different from any other kid.

Stiles is secretly happy when Scott’s mom and Scott’s dad get a divorce. Because once, when Scott is asking if he can go and play at Stiles’s place, and Mr. McCall doesn’t know that Stiles is hiding on the front porch listening, Mr. McCall says, “Stiles? That omega kid? You’re still friends with him?”

Stiles is twelve, and burns with anger and shame in equal measure. He runs away again before he even hears if Scott’s allowed to come and play or not.

He doesn’t like it when people remind him he’s different.

He doesn’t feel any more different than anyone else.

At school, in health class, everyone looks at him when they talk about omegas, which isn’t even fair because there are like four omega girls in the same class and nobody’s like grossed out that _they_ can have babies.

That afternoon, Stiles walks home with Scott and summons up all his courage. “You know,” he says, like he doesn’t even care, “you don’t _have_ to be friends with me.”

Scott screws up his face. “But you’re my _best_ friend.”

“Okay then,” Stiles says, and pretends to stare at a crack in the pavement so Scott can’t see that he’s almost crying.

They’re _best_ friends, and they’re going to be best friends forever.

 

***

 

Stiles is cold. He’s so cold. He can’t feel his feet anymore and his hands, shoved under his armpits, are like blocks of ice. He draws his knees up. Drags his feet like they’re dead limbs. He can hear his shoes scraping against the concrete floor, but he can’t feel anything.

He was hungry a little while ago, but that’s gone now.

He’s thirsty though. Still thirsty.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. It can’t have been too long, because he’s thirsty and they’re not giving him any water. It can’t have been too long, or he’d be dead.

Maybe he’s dead.

It’s so dark, so cold.

He wants his dad. He wants Scott.

Maybe he’s dead.

“Mom?” he croaks into the darkness, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice.

He closes his eyes.

In his dreams he might be running, but at least he can still feel his feet.

 

***

 

Sometimes Stiles thinks that every momentous thing that’s ever happened to him has come courtesy of some doctor. His life feels a little like an undiscovered territory, where men and woman in white coats takes strides and proclaim their discoveries.

Stiles has ADD.

His mom has frontotemporal dementia.

Stiles is an omega.

Stiles kind of hates hospitals. It’s why he doesn’t always go inside when Scott visits his mom, who’s a nurse. Stiles waits in the parking lot instead, kicking bottle caps, or playing on his phone, and watching the people come and go.

Life is motion, but sometimes it feels like Stiles is out of synch with everyone else. A second or two ahead or behind, not quite connecting like he should. The other kids at school think he’s weird. His teachers think he’s a troublemaker. Parents look him up and down like they don’t know what he’s going to do next. All of that, for the price of a bottle of bright blue hair dye.

Even his dad sighs when Stiles dyes his hair blue and shaves the sides of his head.

Scott just laughs and says, “That is so cool! Will you do mine?”

For the next few months Scott walks around with a buzzcut, which is what happens when his mom catches up with him.

 

***

 

He’s so cold. He can feel his warmth draining out of his core. He keeps his eyes closed. Draws in a breath that smells of dirt. He doesn’t want to stay like this, not forever, but what if this is it? What if this is hell? What if it’s not boiling hot and filled with the screams of the damned?

What if it’s cold and dark and silent?

“Mom?” Stiles whispers. Nobody answers.

Nobody ever does.

 

***

 

They find the other half of the body.

Stiles is stunned as his torchlight bounces off something wet and bloody and lands on the woman’s face. She’s beautiful. Her blonde hair lies in waves around her head like a halo, and for a moment Stiles can’t breathe.

He didn’t think—

He didn’t think they’d really find her.

He didn’t think that was even possible. This was supposed to be like every other time Stiles had dragged Scott into the woods. Like when they were ten, and looking for pirate treasure. Like when they were twelve and looking for a haunted native burial ground. This wasn’t meant to be _real_.

Neither were monsters.


	5. Empty Hours

It’s stopped raining by the time Parrish gets to Main Street, but it’s still overcast. Still cold. He left John and Ryan back at the house. He figures they need some time to get themselves acquainted. He also left John his laptop, and pointed him to a few sites with same day delivery so he can pick out some necessities for his grandson.

It’s early still. Not much past seven. There aren’t too many people about yet.

The coffee shop a few blocks from the station is open though. It’s always open early. And the same guy is always seated at the table nearest the counter, reading a book or working at something on his tablet.

Parrish walks in, and the bells on the door jingle. He takes off his damp hat, obscuring his vision for a second. When he looks up again, the woman behind the counter is smiling at him.

“Morning, Sheriff. What can I get you?”

“Just the usual, thanks.”

He likes that about Beacon Hills. Likes that it’s small enough that he can have a usual.

The man at the table lifts his nose as Parrish passes him, as though he’s scenting the air.

“Hell of a storm last night,” the barista says.

“Yeah,” he agrees, his gaze flicking to the man at the table and back again. “You have any problems?”

“Power went out for about ten minutes,” she says. “Nothing major.”

No, nothing major.

She slides his coffee over the counter when she’s done. “You sure you don’t want me to make it a double strength? You look like you haven’t slept a wink.”

“I’m good,” he says, handing over a few bills. “Thanks, Laura.”

 

***

 

He drops in at the station to tell the admin staff he’s working from home today.

“You want me to divert your calls though?” Marcie asks him. “Or just the super mega important ones?”

They’ve got a scale. Since everyone who phones wanting to speak to the sheriff insists their call is important, Marcie divides them into important, very important, super important, and super mega important. Usually that just means the mayor.

“Just super mega important,” Parrish tells her. “Hey, how long has the Bean Counter been open?”

“Oh, now.” Marcie frowns a little. “I guess about four or five years? Laura came back from New York to open it. It was about the time…” She trails off. “Well, you know.”

He can guess.

“And that uncle of hers, he was brought in for questioning, wasn’t he? Over the dead woman in the Preserve?”

“I think so.” She purses her lips. “Things were pretty crazy around here at the time. It should all be in the files though. I remember though that he couldn’t have done it, because he’d only just come out of his coma, and there were so many doctors running so many tests on him that the poor man never had a moment to himself.”

“Right.” Parrish remembers now. Peter Hale had been in a coma for years after the fire. “Seems strange he was a suspect to begin with.”

“Oh, well he threatened her, didn’t he?” Marcie taps her nails against her desk. “First thing he said when he woke up was how he was going to kill that poor woman. Then three days later she’s dead.”

“He must’ve had a hell of a grudge,” Parrish says.

“Well, not just against Kate,” Marcie says. “Against all the Argents. God only knows why.”

“Yeah.” Parrish sighs. “Thanks, Marcie. I’ll be at home if anyone needs me.”

“But only if it’s super mega important,” she tells him with a smile, and waves him away.

It’s raining again when he leaves the station.

 

***

 

The windshield wipers squeak as they move back and forth in front of Parrish’s vision. He takes the long route home, driving out by the high school. There are a few kids running laps on the field, while their coach berates them from under the shelter of an umbrella. The rain makes everything appear a little hazy, a little closer. The woods behind the playing field seem to encroach on the school.

When he first moved here, Parrish liked the fact that the town was surrounded by hills, surrounded by the woods. It feels oppressive today, without sunlight. It feels like the woods are smothering the town.

The trees hold too many secrets.

 

***

 

John’s sitting on the back porch when Parrish gets home. Ryan is sitting on his lap, and together they’re staring out into the rain, into the trees that encroach on the back fence.

“I picked up some groceries,” Parrish says, setting them on the kitchen counter before stepping out to join them. “Do babies eat pasta?”

John shows him an absent smile. “No kids in your family then?”

“Only child,” Parrish confirms. “And no plans to have any of my own any time soon.”

“Well, this little guy’s big enough to try anything,” John says.

Parrish sits down beside him on the step. “I saw Laura Hale today. And her uncle.”

“Peter,” John says.

“I think maybe you need to tell me more about them,” Parrish says.

“I know as much as you do,” John says, tugging gently on one of Ryan’s curls to make him smile tentatively. “The family died in the fire. There were only three survivors. Peter, who was in a coma, and Laura and her brother Derek. They were just kids, really. Laura was barely eighteen. They packed up and went to New York. Then, right before everything, Laura came back. Got word from the hospital that Peter had woken up, I guess.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Parrish,” John says with a sigh. “I was investigating her uncle because he made threats to kill the Argent family. Then it turned out he had a watertight alibi. And then I was pretty fucking distracted.”

Parrish feels a job of guilt in his gut. “Sorry.”

John lets it pass. “I made up the bed in your room, for Ryan and me. If you’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Your mattress protector’s in the washing machine,” John tells him. “He had an accident after breakfast when I put him down for a nap.”

Parrish shrugs it off. “I’m surprised he’s doing so well.”

“Yeah.” John’s forehead creases with a frown. “Reminds me of this kid we found one time. Parents were running a meth lab in their house. Place was a pigsty. The kid was sleeping in a closet. Must’ve been two in the morning, and there we were passing her back and forth, and she didn’t even cry. I told the social worker she was a real good kid, and you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said that kids with parents like that, they learn real fast not to cry for food or for attention.” He draws a shaky breath. “I don’t think my son is that kind of parent, so I gotta ask myself, what sort of hell were they living in?”

“He cried for Stiles though,” Parrish says. “He wanted him back.”

“Yeah,” John says. “He’s not crying now though. You think that’s because he knows he’s safe, or because he figures it won’t make a difference?”

Parrish looks at Ryan, and Ryan gazes back at him.

It suddenly chills him that he can’t tell what those dark eyes are hiding, what they might have seen.

 

***

 

The store delivers in the afternoon. A box of pull ups, a few pairs of jeans, some socks, some shirts, and a red hoodie that Ryan doesn’t drown in. Ryan doesn’t seem interested in his new clothes, or even in the few toys and board books that John got him. He’s placid, Parrish thinks, or it’s something worse than that. Something bone deep in the kid. He clings to John though, and that seems like a positive.

When he gets tired after dinner and his head starts to loll, he doesn’t grizzle. John rubs his back and he nods off slowly as they sit in front of the television.

“I want to be out there,” John says at last.

Parrish thinks of the woods, cold and dark and wet.

“I want to be out there looking for him, not just waiting.”

Except they combed every inch of the woods in the days and weeks after Stiles went missing. Parrish knows that from the reports. There was nothing there then, and there’s nothing there now. The woods have swallowed Stiles whole, again.

“You think he’ll come back?” John asks quietly.

“I don’t know.”

Parrish doesn’t sleep that night. He suspects John doesn’t either.


	6. Empty Promise

The worst thing—no, not the worst thing, but one of the worst—is that John Stilinski didn’t even know. His own son was missing, and he didn’t even know. Sure, he was knee deep in a goddamn murder investigation thanks to the half a dead body some hikers had found out in the Preserve, but he should have _known_.

Looking back, he doesn’t know what he thought.

That Stiles had gone to school early, maybe.

He did that sometimes. Or, when the house was empty because John was at work, he left a note and crashed over at Scott’s place. Or slept in his own bed but went to Scott’s for breakfast. Except there was no note when John arrived home that morning, and he didn’t even notice.

He’d been up all night, and running on nothing but caffeine fumes, and needed to catch at least a few hours sleep before he went back into work. So that was what he did. And didn’t even feel the first flicker of unease until he got the call from Melissa that afternoon.

“John? Is Scott with Stiles? He didn’t come home last night.” Melissa’s voice was already a little sharp with worry, and John tried to soothe the edges off it.

“I’m sure they’re fine, Mel. Tell you what, I’ll swing by the house, kick Scott’s ass, and send him home, okay?”

She laughed a little at that. “Promise?”

He laughed too. “I promise.”

 

***

 

It’s been two months. Two months of no leads. Stiles’s Jeep was found out in the Preserve the day after the boys went missing, and then nothing.

Two months is a lot of hours, a lot of minutes.

John has felt the weight of every one.

 

***

 

It’s Tara who knocks on his door one night, and the look on her face tells him everything he needs to know. His knees give out, and she catches him.

“We don’t know, Sheriff,” she says though her tears. “We don’t know.”

It’s been two months, and the body was found in water.

They don’t know.

 

***

 

John sits on Stiles’s bedroom floor with an open bottle of whiskey clutched in his shaking hands. He’s worked his way about halfway through it by now.

“So,” he says at last to the empty room, to the universe, to God, to who even the fuck knows. “Fifty-fifty, right?”

It a gamble. A coin toss.

John wants to make a deal. Would sell his fucking soul to have Stiles come walking back through the door. Except there’s no grinning demon waiting to take his soul, and that’s no deal John could really make anyway, is it? He wants his son home and safe with every fiber of his being, with every breath, with every beat of his aching heart, but to want that so desperately is also to want Scott to be dead. To hope and pray that the body they found belongs to the kid his son called a brother.

And John’s not there yet.

He’s not fucking there.

He takes another swig of whiskey, and doesn’t even feel the burn anymore.

He wants . . . if he can’t turn the clock back, then he wants to stop it. He wants to freeze it right now, in this moment, when not knowing is still better than knowing. With the coins still up in the air, with the dice still rolling, with those fifty-fifty odds still in play. When both the boys have an equal chance of being alive. When both of them _are_ , as long as nobody opens the box.

Schrödinger’s corpse?

John huffs.

Stiles would think that was funny.

“I don’t want to know,” he tells the empty room, where the detritus of Stiles’s life is still strewn out all over the place because no power in the universe can compel John to put anything away. He needs to keep it like this, to preserve the moment in time when Stiles was _here_. Needs to hold onto that, because it might be all he’s got left. “I don’t want to know.”

He takes another swig.

“Fuck you,” he tells the universe. “Fuck you.”

 

***

 

Stiles was always getting into trouble. People say that now with a knowing sort of sadness, like there’s no other way this could have ended. Like there’s something inevitable about an omega with bright blue hair and a lip ring ending in a bad way. They don’t talk that way about Scott McCall.

 

***

 

“Daddy?” Stiles is five, and he’s a terror. “Daddy, can I turn the sirens on?”

“Nope. Sirens are for emergencies. Is this an emergency?”

Stiles chews his lip as he swipes the cloth over the dash. John gives him five dollars a week for helping him clean the cruiser. Claudia tells him he’s ridiculous, and that five dollars is way too much money for a kid his age.

“Claude, have you _seen_ what Pokémon cards cost?” he always asks her.

That’s his kid. Blowing every cent he gets on Pokémon cards and candy. He’s got no impulse control. But hell, he’s five. What else is he supposed to do? Squirrel his money away in a term deposit account or something?

“It’s not an emergency,” Stiles agrees at last, looking crestfallen.

Damn straight it’s not. Because it’s early Sunday morning and the neighbors are going to be pissed as hell if the sirens come on.

“Tell you what, kiddo,” John says. “After we finish up here, we’ll drive out into the Preserve and you can turn them on, okay?”

Stiles’s entire face lights up. “Yeah! Can Mommy come too?”

“Mommy’s got a headache,” John reminds him. Another damn good reason not to use the sirens here. Claudia’s had a few killer migraines in the past few months that have left her off kilter for hours afterward. The doctor says it’s probably hormonal, and switched her birth control.

They’ve talked about her going off the pill altogether. Talked about giving Stiles a little brother or sister. It feels like the right time to try. Another little hyper monster like Stiles in their lives? He and Claudia must be crazy. Both of them certifiably fucking insane.

John grins at Stiles, overcome with a rush of love for his son.

His infuriating, frustrating, _miraculous_ son.

Stiles beams back at him and winds the cloth around the steering wheel. “When we’re in the Preserve can I pick some flowers for Mommy?”

John reaches out and scruffs Stiles’s hair. “That’s a great idea.”

 

***

 

John drinks until he isn’t lucid anymore. Until he has no memory of how he got from Stiles’s room into his own bed. He wakes up to find himself clutching Stiles’s plush giraffe. It’s so old and worn that its fur is patchy in places, stained in others, and one eye hangs from a string from its face.

John bought it from the hospital gift shop on the day Stiles was born.

He watched Stiles sleep with it in his cot when he was still so tiny.

Watched him learn to walk with it shoved under one arm.

Watched him grow, and whisper all his secrets into that soft yellow ear.

The giraffe stinks of whiskey now. Just another thing John has ruined.

 

***

 

“You want me to do it, sir?” Tara asks him as they approach Melissa’s house.

God, yes.

He’s a coward.

He can’t.

“No,” he grinds out. “I have to.”

Melissa must have seen the cruiser pull up. She opens the door.

She’s aged so much in the past two months. She’s not the only one.

And John’s been here almost every day. So she shouldn’t be surprised to see him. But something on his face must give him away, because she backs away, backs into the house like if he can’t tell her, then it can’t be true.

“No!” she screams at him when he gets close enough to catch her flailing arms and hold them tight against his chest. “No, John! You promised you’d bring him home! You _promised_!”

And the worst part isn’t her screams, her tears, the rising hysteria of her grief. The worst past is the wave of relief that sweeps through him in that moment, because it’s not Stiles whose body they found in the woods.

It’s not _his_ son.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ouch. 
> 
> Also, tomorrow I'm back at work so I'll be posting at about this same time for the next week or so, I think.


	7. Empty Path

There’s a path through the woods that Parrish takes when he jogs. He spends so much time behind his desk that he tries to jog at least five times a week. Sometimes it’s less. Sometimes it’s more too, because it’s the best way he’s found to work out stress. Always has been, for him. He likes the way he can clear his mind when he jogs.

He’s always liked the Preserve. The path that runs behind the house is one of dozens that crosses through the woods. It’s not a marked trail. It’s not on any maps. It’s just a path that’s been created over the years by people, by animals. Just a narrow dirt track that winds through the trees.

It’s impossible to clear his mind today though. Not when all he can think of is Stiles in these woods. Running back to whatever the hell he escaped from in the first place.

Parrish knocks an overhanging branch with his shoulder, and a shuddering cascade of droplets bounce free.

Overcast again today, with more rain forecast.

Colder too.

The trail is quiet. It’s usually pretty deserted. Sometimes Parrish passes someone else jogging, or walking a dog, or guilty kids trying to hide their cigarettes. Today Parrish is halfway around the track when he notices a man ahead of him.

He’s not dressed for running.

He’s wearing jeans and a sweater.

He’s dressed for…

He’s dressed for that table closest to the counter in the coffee shop.

It’s Peter Hale.

Parrish follows the path down a dip around a clump of trees. When he crests the small slope and fixes his eyes on the trail ahead of him, Peter Hale is gone.

 

***

 

The living room has been taken over by John’s old case files. John’s reading one when Parrish gets back from his jog. He’s got Ryan on his knee. Ryan is staring solemnly down at a photograph. Then he looks up at John questioningly.

“Yeah, that’s your daddy,” John tells him. “He’s got silly hair, doesn’t he?”

“Daddy,” Ryan mumbles around his fingers.

“It’s either your daddy or a crazy parrot,” John tells him.

Ryan smiles up at him tentatively, like he doesn’t understand what’s being said, but he knows John is saying something funny.

Parrish sits down opposite them, and nods at the files. “You find anything?”

“Nope.” John’s faint smile vanishes. “Not now, and not five years ago.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop looking.

“So, three cases,” Parrish says. “The Hale fire, Kate Argent’s murder, and Stiles and Scott McCall. You think they all connect?”

“I think it’s a small town,” John says. “Everything connects. But yeah. Most of the Hales died in the fire. Peter Hale comes out of his coma telling the world he’s going to kill the Argents. Then Kate Argent’s found dead in the Preserve, on the same night that…” He trails off and clears his throat.

“Do you know what they were doing out there?” Parrish asks him gently.

“Hell if I know,” John says. “Could have been anything, with Stiles. You know, they say omegas are quiet and respectful, and they naturally follow authority. Not my kid.” His proud smile is tinged with sorrow. “Most of the stuff he got up to, everyone blamed Scott, because Scott was an alpha. But Mel and I knew better.”

Mel. Melissa McCall.

“Is she still in town?” Parrish asks.

“She left. I can’t blame her. Coming home to an empty house every night, and knowing Scotty wasn’t coming back…” John draws in a shuddering breath. “She tried to be supportive, you know. For me. Tried to tell me not to lose hope. And that…that burden, it was unfair on her.” He rubs his thumb over the picture of Stiles. “We were in it together, until suddenly we weren’t. She was mourning her son, and I was still searching for mine.”

Parrish reaches out to the coffee table and picks up a random file, just so he doesn’t have to watch John brush away a tear. “I saw Peter Hale in the woods.”

“Doing what?” John asks, his voice rough.

“Just standing there.” Parrish opens the file. It’s the Hale house fire. Autopsy reports on the deceased. There are a lot of names in it. “I think I’m going to need to talk to him.”

“You mind if I come with you?”

Right.

Like there’d be any way to stop him.

 

***

 

They wait until late afternoon, when the shop is due to close.

The bells on the door of the Bean Counter jingle as Parrish pushes open the door.

“We’re just about to close up,” Laura says, then looks up from the register. “Oh, Sheriff. And… Sheriff Stilinksi?”

“Just John,” John tells her.

Laura’s smile falters as her gaze falls to Ryan. She wipes her hands on her apron, twisting the fabric between her fingers. “Anything I can get you?”

“We’re actually here to talk to your uncle,” Parrish says.

The man himself appears from the door to the kitchen. Parrish hasn’t paid a lot of attention to him before. He’s sharp eyed, his expression bland, but not bland enough that Parrish mistakes it for anything other than a mask. He’s also perfectly unscarred for a man who suffered such severe burns. Parrish can’t see any signs of them on his face, his neck, or his hands. That seems strange.

Laura steps out from behind the counter, and crosses to the door. She locks it, and flips the sign to _Closed_. “Who wants a coffee before I turn off the machine?”

“Laura,” Peter says in a quiet voice.

“Sit,” she tells him. There’s a strange note of authority in her tone. One that Parrish thinks a man as sharp as Peter should bristle under, but he only regards her silently for a moment and then goes and sits.

“So, coffee?” she asks again.

Parrish and John decline.

“How about a babyccino for the little one?” Laura asks.

“A what?”

“It’s steamed milk, lots of froth, and a pinch of chocolate powder on top,” Laura tells him. “It’s on the house.”

“Thanks,” John says, shifting Ryan to his other hip.

Parrish sits down across from Peter, and pushes out a chair for John.

Peter drags his gaze away from Ryan. “You’re here to ask me about Kate Argent,” he says. He blinks at John. “Again.”

“I know you had an alibi,” Parrish says. “And I’m not looking to tear any holes in that.” The ‘yet’ goes unsaid, but he knows Peter hears it. “But I’d like to know why you threatened her.”

“Because I’d just spent six years in a coma,” Peter replies softly. “Because I couldn’t tell the difference between being awake, and being at the mercy of all those nightmares still. I was delusional.”

“It seems a pretty specific delusion,” Parrish comments.

“Well, Sheriff, that’s the thing with delusions. They don’t need to make sense. It’s the textbook definition, in fact. I’m sure my psychologist can fill you in on the science.”

“Peter,” Laura says in a warning tone, setting a tiny paper cup down in front of Ryan.

Ryan looks up at her, and his eyes widen. He pushes up from John’s lap, holding his arms out to Laura desperately.

John exchanges a look with Parish, and holds Ryan out toward her.

Laura takes him, and he snuggles into her. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply. “ _Oh_.”

Parrish is surprised to see she’s crying.

“I told you,” Peter says in a low voice.

“Oh my god,” Laura says, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “ _Derek_.”

“His name is Ryan,” John says, confusion evident in his tone.

“He sm—he looks just like my brother,” Laura manages. She presses a kiss to the top of his head. “He looks just like Derek.”

Except that isn’t what she was going to say. And what? Some toddler with a passing resemblance to a family member, and suddenly she’s in tears? Parrish knows Laura. She’s not the sort of person who breaks down over random children.

But she’s a Hale, and Ryan is a Hale too.

Except how the fuck could Laura possibly know that?

“Laura,” Parrish says, “what the hell is going on?”

Laura glances at Peter, who nods warily.

“Okay,” she says, rocking Ryan gently. “Okay.”

She closes her eyes briefly. When she opens them again, they’re shining bright red.

Holy shit.

 

***

 

“Beer?” Parrish asks when they finally get home a few hours later.

“Beer,” John agrees firmly.

Parrish pulls two out of the refrigerator, twists the top off one and passes it to John. Ryan’s asleep with his head on John’s shoulder.

“So that all just happened, right?” Parrish asks, opening his own beer.

“I think so,” John says, his tone cautious as though he’s waiting for the hidden camera crew to reveal themselves at any moment.

Werewolves. Hunters. The supernatural. The trees were hiding something all right, and Parrish is pretty sure he never would have fucking guessed what it was. Because who would?

They head for the living room, and Parrish helps John ease himself down into the recliner without waking Ryan. He sits down across from them, and stares at the files spread out on the coffee table, and all over the floor.

There’s not much that makes sense in the world right now. Parrish isn’t sure he can trust anything he ever thought he knew. But maybe, in a world where the known facts are suddenly turned upside down, and where crazy fantasies are now the reality, maybe the things that never used to make sense have been flipped on their head as well. Maybe now they’ll finally spot something new in the gaps in the files.

Parrish reaches forward and picks one up.

He opens it and starts to read from the beginning.

 

 


	8. Empty Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's an extra chapter today, because I can't sleep.

“Wait!” a man calls.

Stiles twists on the ground, his face shoved in the dirt, a boot against the back of his neck.

 _Wait_.

Sudden hope blooms like an anemone, in a thousand wild directions.

 _Wait_.

It’s the most powerful word in his world.

They’re not going to kill him.

He’s not going to die.

He can go home. He can find Scott and go _home_.

“Well,” the man says. His voice is closer now, but Stiles can’t lift his head to try and see him. “Look what we have here. A _breeder_.”

 

***

 

Omega.

Breeder.

Freak.

“Different doesn’t mean less, Stiles,” his dad always says. “C’mon, you’re smarter than that.”

But most of the world isn’t smarter than that, and it’s not Stiles writing the rules, is it?

 

***

 

When they bring him out of the darkness, it’s been days. Maybe longer. No, not longer, or he would have died of dehydration. So it’s been days, but it felt like forever.

The light burns his eyes, and he can’t see properly.

There’s a man sitting on a chair in front of him, and someone pushes Stiles down onto his hands and knees, and he goes because he’s too weak to resist.

The man leans forward. The light behind him makes it difficult to see his face. He’s an old guy, maybe. Stiles squints and blinks, but he can’t tell.

“I’m not a monster,” Stiles croaks. “Please don’t hurt me. I’m not a monster.”

He saw—

He _thinks_ he saw something that night, but it’s so hard to separate his memories from the nightmares he had while he was locked in the dark.

They saw the woman’s body.

And then they were running.

No. They saw the woman’s body, and then they heard people coming, and _then_ they were running. He lost Scott somewhere in the dark.

He saw a monster.

He saw the men attack it, bring it to its knees.

And then they did the same to him.

“Not a monster maybe,” the old man says. “But you’re a freak, aren’t you? A little omega freak.”

 

***

 

They strip him naked and put him in a shower. It’s not like a proper bathroom. It’s like the ones in the locker room at school. Stupidly open. More like an industrial space than someone’s house? Stiles hunches over and shivers under the spray, tilting his head back to drink while the men stare at him.

“What the hell’s so special about that?” one of them asks.

“It’s pheromones,” another one says.

“That’s bullshit. It’s not pheromones. They’re just like fucking dogs or whatever. You know how bitches will roll over for the alpha dog? That’s what omegas do.”

“It’s more than that though. They say you fuck ’em once, and you’ll never want anything else.”

A scoff. “He look so special to you? Just a freak of nature. A mutation or something. Should’ve been drowned at birth.”

“Yeah? Looks pretty fine to me.”

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to cry as one of the men moves closer.

“You think it feels different, getting your dick inside an omega?”

A short bark of laughter. “Who wants to find out?”

A sob wrenches out of him.

“Don’t be an idiot. The old man’ll cut your balls off if you touch him.”

Stiles stays under the lukewarm water of the shower, as though it can somehow protect him. As though the spray is a barrier these men can’t penetrate.

_Different doesn’t mean less, Stiles._

It does here.

It does.

 

***

 

There is a legend, the old man says. In the olden days, male omegas were sacrificed to the beasts to ensure the survival of the village.

He laughs when he says it.

He doesn’t believe in legends, he says, but he likes that one.

 

***

 

It’s been days, Stiles thinks. He’s been locked in this room for days, with nothing but a cot and a blanket. At least he has food now, and water.

He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him now.

He hopes Scott made it home okay.

 

***

 

The dead woman was called Kate Argent. The old man is her father. His voice cracks when he talks about her, talks about how she died fighting the monsters. Talks about how clever she was, how brave, how proud. He talks about the struggle, about trying to keep back the dark, and how there are always sacrifices in any war.

Stiles is going to be one of those sacrifices.

At first he thinks Gerard is going to sell him. Maybe that’s not a thing though. Maybe that’s just one of those stories off the internet that isn’t actually real—omegas, particularly boys, being kidnapped and sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

“To fight monsters, we need to study them,” Gerard tells him. “You understand that, don’t you, Stiles?”

“Yes,” Stiles whispers. He pokes his tongue against the small scar in his bottom lip. They took his lip ring out. Shaved his blue hair back down to stubble.

“Good,” Gerard says with a warm smile, and claps his hand on Stiles’s shoulder. “Good boy.”

 

***

 

Stiles screams and fights when they come for him. When they haul him out of his room and drag him down into the basement. When they cuff his hands behind his back, and chain him to a pole.

When they retreat, and pull the caged door closed.

Stiles watches them watching him.

Then, from behind him, he hears an electronic beep, and the sound of a magnetic lock disengaging.

“No!” he screams. “Please, please no!”

Gerard and his men don’t listen.

The monster doesn’t listen.

It prowls forward, growling, and its face is a grotesque mask of ridges and fur and fangs. Stiles starts crying when it steps up close to him, and leans down to sniff his neck.

“Smells sweet, doesn’t he?” Gerard calls. “Smells sweet in all the right ways. Sweet and warm, and ready to breed. I know you want him. It’s been hard enough to keep my men from touching him, and you, you’re no better than an animal.”

The monster growls again, a low rumble that echoes through the room, and steps away from Stiles.

 _Please_ , Stiles mouths at Gerard. _Please_.

He blinks as a red light flashes in his eyes. Then he watches in horror as it settles on his heaving chest. Like one of those laser pointers that he and Scott use to play with Scott’s cat. Except this one, Stiles knows, has a bullet waiting behind it.

“Bite him!” Gerard calls.

For a second Stiles doesn’t understand, but then the monster growls again.

“Bite him, or I’ll kill him,” Gerard says.

The monster stalks down toward the door, towards the hunters. He grips the bars in his clawed hands, and _roars_. The sound shakes the room. Electricity sparks, and then the monster is reeling away from the bars again.

“Is that what you want, Derek?” Gerard asks, and how does a monster have a _name_? “You want me to kill this sweet little omega, all because you won’t mate him? Give him the mating bite, Derek. Save his life.”

The monster growls again.

“Or maybe one more life doesn’t matter to you?”

Stiles sucks in a hitching breath as the red dot moves into position over his heart.

And then it’s gone, because the monster is standing in front of him, eyes brilliant blue, fangs protruding. He lunges forward suddenly.

Stiles screams when those fangs puncture the flesh between his neck and his shoulder.

 

***

 

There is a legend, Gerard says, of omegas who could soothe savage beasts. Of omegas who could use their mating bond like a chain, to reel a monster in and then bind it. Strangle it.

Gerard doesn’t think omegas are weak.

To study a monster, Gerard says, first you need to catch one with just the right bait.

 

***

 

Stiles is delirious with fear, and maybe with shock. When Gerard and his hunters bring Derek down with electricity, when Stiles is released and sags to the floor, when one of the men is pressing a bandage to his wound, he can only lie there and cry.

They take him back to his room, to his blanket and his cot, and lock him in.

He shivers when he hears the distant howl echoing from the basement, and curls into a tight ball and tries to sleep.

That night he dreams of being ripped apart by fangs and claws.

He wakes up screaming.

 

 

 

 


	9. Empty Grid

Parrish doesn’t think he’s used the dining room of the house since he moved in. When he’s got friends over they’re either planted in front of the television watching a game, or out on the patio gathered around the grill. The dining room, out of all the other rooms in the house, is the one that serves to remind Parrish of just how much he lives alone.

It’s strange to set the table for four. The less said about the mismatched cutlery, the better.

Ryan has been unsettled and whiny all day, trailing after John whenever John sets him down for a moment, tugging at his jeans and wanting to be picked up. John is endlessly patient with him. Parrish makes some comment on it, and John huffs out a breath.

“This? This is easy. Stiles ran us ragged from the time he could crawl.” He smiles gently, and looks past Parrish down the hallway of the house he must have chased Stiles down a hundred times a day.

The rain patters gently on the roof.

Parrish spends the day making a few calls, making sure everything is still running smoothly at the station. He makes Ryan lunch, when Ryan appears in the kitchen and stares at him while he’s making a pastrami sandwich. Should toddlers eat pastrami? Ryan seems to like it, anyway.

Laura and Peter arrive by six. It’s dark already, although the rain has eased off.

If he didn’t watch them carefully with Ryan, Parrish wouldn’t be able to tell anything different. But Laura picks him up when he holds his arms up to her, kisses the top of his head. Rubs her cheek against his, in a gesture that Parrish first reads as overly affectionate, but then realizes no, it’s animalistic. It’s the sort of thing he’s seen on Animal Planet. Then Laura hands him over to Peter, who does the same. Peter sniffs at the toddler’s neck, and then tilts his head to let Ryan do the same to him.

“He knows we’re pack,” Laura says quietly.

Peter passes Ryan back to John, who takes him warily.

They sit at the dining room table and eat. Pasta with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread on the side, because Parrish is no chef, but that one dish everyone can make? This is his.

They talk while they eat.

“Derek and I ran, after the fire.” Laura turns her fork over and over in her hand, and glances at Peter. “We went to New York, and put Beacon Hills behind us. I thought it was the right decision at the time.”

Peter’s mouth curls up in a bitter smile, so Parrish figures there’s a story there.

“We came back when the hospital said Peter was awake.”

“ _Both_ of you?” John asks keenly.

“It was easier to pretend he was still in New York after…” Laura exhales. “After he went missing.”

John frowns at her and leans forward. “You never reported this.”

“What was I going to say?” Laura’s mouth tightens into a thin line for a moment. “We had a fight and he ran off. I thought he’d cool off and be back in a few days.”

“A few days turned into five years, and you still never reported it?” Parrish asks.

“And tell you _what_?” Laura asks, her helplessness evident in her tone. “When we realized, we knew it had to be someone who knew about us. So what was I supposed to tell the police?”

Peter’s gaze flicks over both Parrish and John. “We stayed,” he says. “We didn’t stop searching, even when his scent was gone. We still go out into the Preserve every day.”

“How do you know he hadn’t gone east again?” John asks, brow furrowing.

“Because we’re pack, and we’re here,” Laura says, with quiet certainty in her tone.

There’s a lot to take on faith lately. More than Parrish can cope with, if he thinks about it. But that’s the fun thing about repressing all this crazy shit. He doesn’t need to think about it. Werewolves, sure. Hunters, okay. Supernatural fuckery, fine. Parrish feels like a stranger in what’s been revealed to be a very strange land indeed.

Laura pulls her phone out of her pocket. “I’ve got some pictures of Derek on here.” She looks at Ryan, and then at John. “Can I…”

John’s expression is guarded, but he must be as curious to know as Parrish is. He nods. “Go ahead.”

Laura unlocks her screen, and scrolls through her photos. Then she slides the phone over to John, where Ryan can see it too.

Ryan looks at the phone, eyes widening. Then he looks up at John. “Papa!”

“Is it?” John asks, holding Laura’s gaze. “Is that your papa?”

“Papa,” Ryan repeats, wiping his grubby fingers all over the screen of Laura’s phone. A weird strangled noise rises out of him. “Ooooh! Papa! Oowooh!”

Parrish almost chokes on his garlic bread.

Ryan’s trying to _howl_.

 

***

 

“He recognises me as the alpha,” Laura says after dinner.

Not an alpha. _The_ alpha. Like that should mean something.

John frowns. “He’s too little to respond like that.”

“Pack hierarchy,” Peter says, leaning forward on the couch and holding out his finger so that Ryan can use it to pull himself to his feet. “It has nothing to do with gender. I’m an alpha, but not the pack alpha. In the pack, I’m a beta.”

“Seems confusing,” John comments.

Ryan lunges forward and tries to swallow Peter’s finger.

“Not really.” Peter extracts his finger from Ryan’s mouth, and curls them up to let him gnaw on his knuckles instead. “Gender classification and pack classification are two different things. One doesn’t relate to the other.”

John pulls out one of the files from the stack. “You said before that you tried to catch Derek’s scent? Track him, you mean?”

“We tried,” Laura says. “It’s hard to explain. His trail should have faded, but it didn’t. It just… it just _stopped_.”

“There’s a map in here somewhere,” John mutters, and finds it finally. He opens it onto the coffee table. It’s the Preserve, with a grid marked out over it, with dates and times written in each sector. “Do you remember where it stopped?”

Laura studies the map for a moment, leaning forward and tucking her hair behind her ears. At last she taps a section of the map. “Here, I think.”

John sighs. “There’s nothing there though. I mean, the Preserve is full of old buildings, old cellars, from back in the logging days. I think there’s even a tin mine in there somewhere. But there’s nowhere for someone to just go missing from there.”

Parrish knows from the reports that the search of the Preserve was thorough. More than through, even. They’d brought in ground-penetrating radar and a thermal imager to look for shallow graves, or hidden bunkers, or old mine shafts. The cost of those things, prohibitive to a small department, had been borne by the FBI. Scott’s father was an agent. He’d stayed on the case for two years after Scott’s death, and turned up the same as everyone else: nothing.

“So there must be ways for someone to hide a scent,” Parrish says, looking carefully at Laura and Peter. “Someone who knew they were dealing with a werewolf, because otherwise why bother?”

Peter’s eyes flare gold suddenly.

Laura puts a hand on his forearm. “Hunters.”

“Argents,” Peter says, his voice suddenly like a growl.

Laura purses her lips for a moment. “No. Chris isn’t—”

Peter pulls his arm away from hers, and fusses over Ryan’s curls for a moment.

“Chris Argent still lives in town,” Laura explains. “He was a hunter.”

“ _Was_ ,” Peter scoffs quietly.

“Was,” Laura repeats. “And we spent months following him, and we never found anything.”

“Just following him?” Parrish asks.

Laura shrugs. “We did a little breaking and entering too. And everywhere he went, we searched. Thoroughly.”

John leans back in his chair. “So how the hell does my son fit into all this?” His gaze falls on Ryan. “Apart from the obvious. What the hell would hunters want with a fifteen-year-old kid?”

Laura looks distraught. “Our pack bonds are very strong. Maybe they wanted Ryan. To use him as leverage over Derek.”

“Or maybe they wanted a pup they could train to wear a leash,” Peter mutters. “Raise one of us to hunt down the others.”

“They don’t need my _son_ for that!”

“Maybe they did,” Peter says, looking up to meet John’s gaze. “There’s an old legend about male omegas being used to tame wolves.”

“What the hell does that mean?” John asks.

“I think it probably refers to the fact that, out of species, wolves can usually only breed with omegas,” Peter says. “A union between a wolf and a human is most often sterile. In the rare cases it results in children, those children are invariably human. Nature’s way of preventing us from overrunning humanity, I suppose. Even with human female omegas, the children tend to be human. But they say with a male omega, any child will be born a wolf.”

“Really?” Parrish asks with a frown.

“It’s not like there are peer reviewed studies published in scientific journals, of course.” Peter’s mouth quirks up briefly. “Just a lot of anecdotal evidence handed down in pack histories. But Ryan is certainly a wolf.”

 Ryan gnaws on Peter's knuckles, wide eyed. 

***

 

Peter and Laura leave after John puts Ryan to bed. Or they don’t. Several times during the night Parrish checks the doors and the windows. He thinks he imagines the shapes in the darkness, obscured by the soft rain.

He knows John’s not sleeping. Parrish can’t blame him. It’s been two days, and Stiles was supposed to come back. Every passing hour feels heavier than the last.

Parrish checks the doors and windows again.

The red flash of eyes he sees when he steps onto the back porch, flashlight in one hand and Glock in the other, doesn’t frighten him like it should.

Laura’s watching the house.

 


	10. Empty Heat

Stiles’s first real heat hits when he’s been locked up in the compound for a few months. He wakes up feeling warm, like maybe he’s got a cold coming on or something. He doesn’t even realize the scars from his bite mark are itching until he catches Gerard looking at him as he rubs them absently.

The way the old man smiles makes him feel a little sick.

They have this… _relationship_. Stiles can’t really figure it out. But Gerard is okay. Like, if you don’t count the whole abduction thing. Which sometimes, when Stiles has been thinking about it for too many hours, almost makes sense, right? Gerard is an asshole, sure, but he’s fighting monsters, and at least he’s human. And okay, so he’s pretty much sacrificed Stiles to his cause, but Stiles _gets_ that. It’s a war. There are casualties in every war.

And Gerard treats him okay. He lets him read books, and drink soda, and sometimes he talks to Stiles about his kids, about how he trained them up to fight the things that come from the darkness, and how his Katie did him so proud in the end. And when Stiles sees the old man’s eyes shine with tears, he _gets_ it.

You have to become a monster to fight the monsters, right?

Nothing’s black and white.

He gets that.

He gets it.

He tells himself over and over that he gets it, but he still cries himself to sleep at night. He still wants to go home, to his dad and Scott. He wants to be that kid again, the one with the blue hair and the bad attitude who didn’t know that monsters were real.

He rubs his shoulder unconsciously, and digs his spoon through his oatmeal. The ADD meds Gerard has him on aren’t the same as his old ones, and sometimes it’s hard to keep his thoughts together, to keep focused.

“Stiles,” Gerard says.

Stiles looks up at him, and sets his bowl on the floor.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah.” Stiles rubs at his shoulder again, and then realizes what he’s doing. His scar aches. Not like in a painful way. But it’s kind of warm and itchy.

Gerard steps forward and presses his palm to Stiles’s forehead.

His smile tells Stiles everything he needs to know.

 

***

 

It takes another two days for his heat to hit fully. Two miserable days of no appetite, and a rising temperature, and the urge to sit under the cold shower and just jerk himself off. Two days of Gerard’s hunters leering at him, and laughing at him, and calling him names under their breath.

_omega freak slut whore bitch_

Two days of Stiles begging for his heat suppressants, because he’s so scared, and he doesn’t want to go in the basement again, doesn’t want the monster to tear him apart, doesn’t want to get raped and killed.

“Please!” he screams at the two hunters who drag him down the dark steps. “Please, please! Please don’t!” He’s crying, his face covered in tears and snot. “I want my dad! I want to go _home_!”

“Fuck this noise,” one of the hunters says as they fling him into the basement and roll the cage door shut. “Should have just shot him like his friend.”

They leave him on the floor, sobbing Scott’s name.

 

***

 

The beep and clank of the magnetic lock.

Stiles freezes, curled up into a ball, as the monster approaches him.

No no no no no.

He can’t fight it. He’s not strong enough.

He flinches as a hand runs down his back and settles on his hip.

Fingers curl around his hip.

Not claws.

Fingers.

Stiles opens his mouth to suck in some air, and he’s hit by a sickening wall of arousal, of terror, of _mate alpha touch fuck breed_.

A rush of white heat tears through him.

 

***

 

When he comes to, he’s straddling the monster’s lap, his head tucked into its throat. There’s one hand splayed against his lower back, and one cradling his head. He smells so good that Stiles starts to rock against him before he even knows what he’s doing.

“Don’t. Don’t do that.” A thumb brushes against the scar at the juncture of his shoulder and his throat. “Go to sleep. Just try to go to sleep.”

Stiles gets his hands on the monster’s chest, and pushes away from him. He turns his head, his heart in his throat. It’s not the grotesque face he remembers. It’s a guy. A guy with a pale face and stubble, and wide, worried eyes.

He’s beautiful.

“Derek?” he asks in a whisper, because that’s what Gerard called the monster.

“Shh,” Derek says. “Try to sleep.”

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t remember much of the heat. It comes to him in shameful flashes. He remembers trying to rub himself off against Derek. Remembers trying to shove his jeans and underwear down. And he remembers the way Derek held his wrists so he couldn’t struggle, couldn’t fight, as the heat burned through him.

“It hurts,” he whimpered once. “Please. Do it, please. I _need_ it.”

“Close your eyes. Just close your eyes and sleep.”

He remembers that he screamed at Derek and swore at him, and Derek didn’t even flinch.

When it’s over, when Stiles is a shivering, sweaty unsatisfied mess, Derek tugs his jeans halfway down his thighs, rips his underwear, and wipes dirt over his hands, his cheek, his back.

“Why didn’t you?” Stiles asks, his voice raw. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because you’re a prisoner,” Derek tells him. “Because you’re a _kid_.”

Stiles is still shaking when the hunters come back for him.

They laugh at him because he looks so wrecked.

Stiles follows them back up the stairs, resisting the urge to turn around and look at Derek.

Sometimes the monsters aren’t who he thinks.

 

***

 

Gerard is solicitous after it happens. Or it doesn’t happen. He makes sure Stiles has his favorite brand of soda, and even brings him a pizza.

“You’re a good kid, Stiles,” he says, his voice gruff.

Stiles listens to one of his speeches about war and sacrifice, and the good people who’ve gone before him. Except Gerard doesn’t think he’s a soldier, does he? Stiles’s value isn’t in his bravery, or his commitment, or his skill. Stiles’s value is in a quirk of biology. Gerard doesn’t put him in the same category as those who’ve chosen to fight. Stiles is nothing more than a vessel to him. Nothing more than meat.

“Wh-what is that thing?” he asks. It’s not hard to put a tremor in his voice.

“A werewolf,” Gerard says. “A fucking vicious _dog_.”

Stiles nods, wide eyed, and thinks of the way Derek held him. “I thought it was going to kill me!”

“He won’t kill you,” Gerard says, patting him on the head. “I’ll go against every instinct he has to hurt his mate. At least on purpose.” He laughs.

No. The monster was never in the basement, was he?

Stiles thinks of Scott. He doesn’t have to fake his tears for his best friend. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”

“Just let nature take its course,” Gerard tells him.

He leaves the room and locks the door behind him.

 

***

 

Gerard said there was a bond. Said that Stiles could use it to reel the monster in. Stiles lies awake that night and tries to imagine it, a shining thread that links him to Derek now. He presses his fingers into his scar, and it aches gently.

He doesn’t want any of this.

He just wants to go _home_.

 

***

 

A few days later, Stiles is taken down the steps again. He’s crying again, and not even sure how much of it is for show. When the magnetic lock disengages and Derek enters the basement, Stiles lifts his head and watches him approach.

He’s wearing his monster’s face again.

Stiles scrambles backward, whining, and hears the laughter of the hunters before their boots thump up the steps again.

Derek steps toward him, his face morphing back to human in an instant.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice low. “It’s better if they think you’re scared.”

“I _am_ scared,” Stiles croaks. “I’m fucking terrified!”

Derek steps back quickly.

“Not…” Stiles swallows, and then the words just tumble out of him. “Not of you, I don’t think. Maybe. I don’t know. Like, I’m pretty sure I hardcore Stockholm syndromed Gerard there for a while, and maybe I’m just doing the same thing to you now, or maybe it’s something to do with the bite, or the bond, or whatever, because I feel like I should be a lot more freaked out by you than I am, but hey.” He tries for a shrug, but it ends up like more of a full body shudder.

In the silence that follows, Derek raises his eyebrows. “Stockholm syndrome is not a verb.”

“That’s what you got out of that?” Stiles blinks up at him, and fights the crazy urge to laugh. “I’m mated to a grammar Nazi.”

Derek’s expression shutters.

Shit.

“Don’t, okay?” Stiles says. “I’m not blaming you. It’s not like we _did_ anything.”

“But I bit you,” Derek says.

“So?”

“That’s for life.”

Oh shit. Oh shit shit shit.

“Oh Jesus,” Stiles whispers on an exhale, his stomach clenching. “Is it like a werewolf thing?”

Derek nods.

“I think that maybe you should tell me exactly what Gerard’s signed me up for,” he manages at last.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Derek says. “But first, will you tell me your name?”


	11. Empty Leads

John is not doing well. Parrish can’t even imagine what the past few days have been like for him, and that’s not even counting the supernatural shit show that is apparently Beacon Hills. Maybe he was actually in a place where he’d finally started to find peace—and won’t he hate himself for that when it hits him?—but suddenly he’s back to where he was five years ago: with a missing son and a ticking clock.

“I thought we could go and see Chris Argent today,” Parrish says over breakfast.

John looks down at Ryan, indecision written across his face.

“You could ask Laura to watch him,” Parrish suggests.

John tightens his arm around Ryan almost imperceptibly.

Of course he doesn’t want to let him go. And they’ve taken so much on trust in these past few days, but how do they know that Laura and Peter are telling the truth? How do they know they won’t vanish as soon as they have Ryan? Clearly he’s their pack. Is it so crazy to imagine they think their claim trumps John’s?

“He was a great kid, you know?” John says, offering Ryan a crust from his toast. “Stiles. Maybe a lot of other people wouldn’t have agreed with that. The hair. The lip ring. The mouth on him.”

“What the hell would other people know anyway?” Parrish asks quietly.

John’s smile is tinged with sadness. “When he presented as an omega, they gave us a bunch of pamphlets to read. All that stuff about how his body was changing, but also this bullshit about how he’d respond to an alpha, how other kids would want to go out and party, but he’d want to _nest_. Like a goddamn _bird_.” He snorts. “Well, this one summer I sent him to camp, and they had special activities there for the omegas. Neither of us knew it at the time, but he wasn’t allowed to play ball or go swimming with the alphas and betas. Instead they stuck him in a cabin with the other omegas and made him do craft. I think I’ve still got the needlepoint he made me.”

Parrish raises his eyebrows.

“He embroidered ‘Dad, this camp sucks balls’ on it.” John laughs, although his eyes are shining with tears. “Top notch stitching though. Really fine work.”

And suddenly Parrish feels an ache inside him. He wants to meet the kid that Stiles was then. The kid who refused to be corralled into the narrow spaces of other people’s expectations. The troublemaker who pushed back.

“He always said he never wanted kids,” John says. “Not until after college. And he had college planned out all the way through to his PhD. Then one day he comes home from school, and it turns out he’s helped one of the senior girls with her applications. And he looks at me and says, ‘Dad, why do they want to know on the scholarship form if you’re an omega?’ Omegas aren’t supposed to want to go to college. There’s this idea that they won’t see it through. That they’ll rush off and get bonded and get pregnant. So you wonder to yourself, if your kid ticks that he’s an omega, is he going to get that scholarship he needs?”

“I never knew that,” Parrish says.

John shrugs. “Before I had an omega kid, I never thought too much about how the deck’s stacked against them. But there’s always something, every day, even if it’s just the way the neighbors look at him.”

Ryan reaches out for his plastic cup of orange juice, and John helps him hold it.

“I spent so long telling Stiles that his gender didn’t come with a bunch of rules set in stone, that it was okay to be whoever the hell he wanted to be, and to aim for whatever he wanted.” John closes his eyes briefly. “And in the end someone took him from me because of the one thing I promised didn’t define him as a person.”

“What else could you have done?” Parrish asks him. “What else should you have told him?”

“Hell if I know,” John says, drawing a breath and squaring his shoulders. He smiles down at Ryan’s solemn face. “Okay. Let’s call Laura.”

 

***

 

Chris Argent runs a hunting and camping supply store in Beacon Hills. Parrish hasn’t had a lot to do with him before. He’s a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and he pays his very rare parking fines on time, and the man has done absolutely nothing to make Parrish suspect he’s hiding any secrets.

Still, walking up the aisle of the store, the racks of guns against the far wall, causes a chill to go down Parrish’s spine. Hunter, or _hunter_?

“Hi.” A dark haired young woman wearing a green shirt with the store logo on it intercepts them somewhere near the fishing rods. “Can I help you with anything?”

“We’re here to see Chris Argent,” Parrish says, dropping his gaze to her name badge. “Is he in, Allison?”

“Yeah, I think so.” She smiles, and shows her dimples. “Sherriff Parrish, right? You look a little different when you’re not in uniform.”

“That’s me,” Parrish says.

“Dad’s probably in his office,” Allison says. “I’ll show you through.”

Chris Argent is in his late forties, Parrish guesses, and in better shape than most guys half his age. His handshake is firm, and his gaze is steady.

“Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve just got a few questions for you on an unsolved case,” Parrish tells him. “You remember Sheriff Stilinksi?”

“Of course.” Argent shakes John’s hand too. “Ally, the boots we ordered aren’t in yet. Go call the supplier for me, would you?”

Allison nods and excuses herself.

“Sorry. We’ve got stocktaking coming up, and the place is a mess. Take a seat.” Chris shifts a pile of boxes from one of the chairs around his desk, and sets them on the floor. Then he sits down behind his desk. “Is it about Kate?”

“I know you were interviewed at the time,” Parrish says, “but I was hoping that maybe you’d remembered something else about that night.”

Chris shakes his head slightly. “Look, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t even in Beacon Hills at the time. My wife and I were living in Sacramento. We came back to help support my father when Kate was found.”

“And then you stayed,” Parrish says.

“Sounds crazy, right?” Chris says with a wry smile. “Staying in a town where something like that happened.”

It does, a little, and Chris doesn’t elaborate.

John frowns. “Do you think Peter Hale killed Kate?”

Chris’s expression shutters for a moment, and then he shakes his head again. “He had an alibi. An alibi _you_ investigated. Has something happened to change that?”

“No,” John says. “But one thing I never understood, even back then, was how much Peter Hale hated your family. What do you know about that?”

“It’s a small town,” Chris says. “With bad blood and long memories, I guess.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like hunters,” Parrish says, and gives Chris a moment to wonder exactly how much he knows. “You know, one of those environmental types. The Hales had a big house right out in the Preserve, didn’t they?”

“Look,” Chris says, “whatever bad blood there was between my family and the Hales, it’s done. We didn’t come back here to feed old grudges. I mind my own business, and the Hales mind theirs. That’s all there is to it. So, if there’s nothing else you need to know?”

“What happened to your father?” John asks suddenly.

“He moved down to Beacon Valley,” Chris says, wearing a slight frown.

“He come back much?”

“He doesn’t come back at all,” Chris says. “We don’t see eye to eye. I haven’t spoken to him in years, probably.”

“Do you have his address?” Parrish asks.

Chris looks at him warily for a moment, then opens his desk drawer and pulls out a diary. “Yeah. I think it’s in here somewhere.”

 

***

 

Beacon Valley is a larger town than Beacon Hills. The sun is breaking through the clouds as they reach it. The follow the GPS co-ordinates to the address that Chris gave them. The woman who lives there bought the place three years ago. She’s never heard of someone called Gerard Argent.

 

***

 

“It has to be him,” Laura says when they finally make it back home. “That evil old bastard. He’s never lived by the Code.”

“The what?” Parrish asks.

“The Code,” Laura says. “They say they only hunt what hunts them, but it’s bullshit. At least it was to Gerard. He killed Deucalion’s pack, and…” She trails off and looks out into the back yard, where Peter is leading Ryan around the wet grass, pointing out puddles to stomp in. Ryan’s wearing bright yellow rain boots that Parrish is pretty sure he didn’t own this morning.

“And?” John prompts Laura gently.

“And Peter says that when he crawled out of the fire, he saw Kate,” Laura says. A shadow passes over her face. “He saw her standing there, watching him burn.”


	12. Empty Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full credit to LittleMissGriff for the line about eyeballs on a stick!

Stiles doesn’t recognize his face in the mirror. It’s thinner than it should be. Sharper. He was dragged here as a terrified kid. It’s not a kid’s face that stares out at him anymore from the speckled glass.

It’s been too long.

Nobody is coming to rescue him.

He’s going to die in this place.

“You’re not going to die here,” Derek whispers to him later that night, when his panic attack has subsided and he can breathe again.

He has more freedom now. He’s more trusted now. Gerard and the others think he’s a good little omega, always eager to roll over and spread his legs for Derek, and just as eager to do what Gerard tells him.

The hunters let him fetch his own food from the kitchen. Let him go to the bathroom without waiting right outside. Let him decide when he wants to go down the stairs to the basement. They think he’d bonded now, with Derek. And he has maybe, but not because of his fucking biology. They think getting fucked by an alpha has knocked all his rebellious edges off, because that’s what all omegas crave, isn’t it? An alpha to fuck them stupid and keep them in their place.

It’s taken forever to build the tiny amount of trust that Stiles has. He wants to use it against them somehow, but he’s afraid it’s not enough of a weapon. The problem is there’s nowhere to use that trust, no weakness in the routine that Stiles can lever open. The compound is secure, and Stiles is only allowed in what he suspects is one very small part of it. There aren’t even any windows he can look out of.

He stays with Derek some nights. They drag his mattress out into the main basement, and curl up in the nest of blankets there. In the morning Stiles looks rumpled and sated. The hunters don’t know that Derek’s never even touched him in that way.

They hold each other at night though.

It makes the darkness a little more bearable.

“I am,” Stiles whispers back. “So are you.”

Derek strokes his hair.

Stiles digs into his pocket. “Look what I found in one of the med kits.” He presses the foil packet into Derek’s hand. “Please, Der. Please can we?”

Derek doesn’t say anything.

“I love you, you know,” Stiles whispers. “That’s not the bite, or the bond, or even the fact you’re the only fucking person in this place I trust. I love _you_.”

“Stiles…”

“Please.” Stiles takes the packet back and rips the condom open. “Please let me have something good in my life, just for tonight.”

He knows Derek won’t refuse.

He knows Derek loves him too.

 

***

 

Stiles has never even kissed someone before, and he knows he’s doing it wrong, that he’s to uncoordinated, too messy, but Derek only curls his fingers in Stiles’s hair and deepens the kiss, and suddenly everything is perfect.

Stiles is jittery when he peels his clothes off. Cold. But Derek’s body is warm and his arms close around Stiles’s back, and it feels so right.

It hurts a little when Derek pushes into him, and Stiles hisses at the sting, but Derek kisses him again, and goes slow, and the hurt transforms into a dull ache, and then into something else entirely.

Stiles is wet and slick, something he always thought he’d hate, because it marks him as omega, but it feels so good, and Derek’s so big, but not _too_ big, and there’s a place inside Stiles that lights up with electricity whenever Derek thrusts gently.

It’s good, so good, and Stiles doesn’t know why he’s crying, but everything is just overwhelming right now, and it can’t last, it won’t last, and there’s no room for something so perfect in the world they’ve living in.

“I love you.”

Stiles lets the words escape from him on a shuddering exhale, and Derek breathes them in, exhales them back to him.

This feels like a tiny bright moment in an endlessly black night, and Stiles clings to Derek desperately, breathing raggedly against his mouth, his throat.

While Stiles comes, he squeezes his eyes shut and thinks he sees lights bursting all around him.

 

***

 

“Shit,” Derek mutters.

“What?” Stiles strains to see in the dark.

“It broke. It fucking broke.”

Stiles feels a chill run through him.

 

***

 

He’s not. He can’t be. He doesn’t feel any different, not really, but as the weeks pass he thinks he notices a change. At night he presses his fingers against his abdomen, prods it and pokes it, but he can’t be sure, and it’s nothing, right? He’s just panicking about nothing.

It’s not going to happen.

It’s not.

One night he walks down the basement steps, a hunter at his side to lock him in and then punch the code in to release Derek from the small steel reinforced cell that feeds into the basement. The hunters have stopped smirking whenever he goes to Derek. They’re bored with him, Stiles thinks. It’s easy enough to play the placid omega.

Derek growls for show when he’s released, and the hunter just snorts and heads back up the stairs.

Stiles digs the pack of chips out of his pocket. “Want some?”

Derek’s face doesn’t change. It’s the wolf’s face.

“What?” Stiles asks. “ _What_?”

“Stiles.” His name is distorted a little around Derek’s fangs.

“What?” Stiles asks, a sick lump in his stomach.

Derek presses a hand to his abdomen. “I can hear a heartbeat.”

No.

Oh god, no.

 

 

***

 

“Punch me,” Stiles whispers. “Punch me in the gut, as hard as you can.”

Derek looks horrified.

“I don’t want it!” Stiles says, his tears starting to fall. “I don’t want another thing Gerard can use against us!”

Derek pulls him into his lap. “I know. I’m sorry. I know.”

Stiles wraps his arms around Derek’s neck, and buries his face in his throat. “I’m not a crier, just so you know.”

“Okay,” Derek agrees, rubbing his hands down his spine gently.

“I mean, sure, when I’m abducted and held captive by a psycho geriatric and get pregnant, _then_ I’m a crier,” Stiles mumbles. “But in my regular daily life, not at all.”

“Okay,” Derek repeats, and Stiles can hear the smile in his voice.

Strange that they can still smile, after everything.

“Tell me about that,” Derek says. “Your regular daily life.”

They’ve been locked in the compound for almost two years now. Stiles doesn’t think there’s anything Derek doesn’t know about him, or that he doesn’t know about Derek. They’ve shared tiny little things that don’t count for anything. They’ve shared the biggest things too.

Kate Argent seduced Derek into telling her the secrets of the tunnels underneath the Hale house. She used that knowledge to set the fire that killed most of Derek’s pack.

“Are you the one who killed her?” Stiles had asked, wide eyed when Derek had told him. “Because I hope you killed her.”

“I didn't kill her.”

Stiles believes that. He knows Gerard doesn’t.

Stiles breathes against Derek’s throat and fishes around for some dumb memory. He settles on his mom and dad, and on the way his mom used to try and make his pancakes into bat shapes, because Batman is the greatest. Except they always came out wrong, and one day his dad asked if they could have maple leaf shaped pancakes.

“You know, Claude,” he says now, in his best dad impression. “The ones you always make for Stiles.”

And she’d yelled at him that those were _Batman_ , and if he thought he could do better he was welcome to try. And it had ended with pancake batter all over the kitchen, and both his parents laughing, and in the end they went to the diner for breakfast.

Derek laughs silently, his whole body vibrating under Stiles.

“Our baby’s going to be so cute,” Stiles tells him, pushing past the ache and trying to stay as long as he can comforted in Derek’s embrace, and in the embrace of his warmest memories. “Like, with your eyes, and nose, and everything you’ve got going on.”

“Yeah,” Derek murmurs. “I think we’ll make a pretty baby.”

Stiles snorts. “Either that or it’ll come out nothing but ears, teeth, and eyeballs on a stick.”

Derek laughs again, and Stiles buries his face in his throat and tries his hardest not to cry.

 

 

***

 

 

Gerard is delighted when he sees the swell of Stiles’s abdomen. When peeing on a stick confirms it. He pats Stiles on the head, and Stiles fights not to cringe away from his touch.

“Good boy,” he says approvingly. “I knew you’d manage it in the end.”

Managed it first try, actually, fuck his life.

“Good boy.” Gerard’s hand lingers too long on the back of his neck.

He’s going to die here. So is Derek.

And what will happen to their baby when they do?

 


	13. Empty Past

“Sheriff!” Marcie exclaims, and then looks from John to Parrish and back again. “I mean—”

“It’s fine, Marcie,” Parrish tells her with a smile.

It’s interesting watching John interact with his former colleagues, and with the station itself. He runs his hand absently down the walls and curls his fingers around doorjambs just like he did at the house. It must have been just as hard, Parrish thinks, for him to have given this up too.

Parrish is distracted, and misses Marcie’s question. He catches John’s reply.

“Oh, just passing through,” John tells her. “And Sheriff Parrish was kind enough to let me visit the station.”

John asks after Marcie’s husband, and her kids, and Parrish can see the moment when she reins herself in. Parrish knows she loves nothing more than to brag about how well Erin is doing at college, and how Joey won silver in the freestyle at the state championships. Those aren’t the sorts of conversations you can have with a man whose fifteen-year-old son walked out of the house one night and never came home.

It takes them a while to make it as far as Parrish’s office. Everyone who worked with John before is eager to say hello.

John looks almost wrung out by the time Parrish closes the office door behind him.

“Was it hard for you to leave?” Parrish asks him.

“One of the hardest things I ever did,” John says, looking around the office, at the unfamiliar things on familiar shelves. “But I had to do it. I couldn’t be here anymore, not when it had been so long without any leads. You tell yourself in a case like that, someone will come forward eventually. But when nobody does, and all you’re doing is waiting? It’s hard to get out of bed every day when that’s all you’ve got to look forward to. Harder to walk into a place like this one.”

Parrish sits down behind his desk and turns on his computer.

John is still browsing the shelves. He sees the framed photograph. “You were in the army?”

“Yeah.” Parrish types his password in. “That was taken in Afghanistan.”

“I did a few years in the army myself,” John says. “Straight out of high school.”

Parrish smiles a little a that. “Seems like a good idea when you’re eighteen, right?”

“Right.” John returns the smile and takes a seat. He nods at the computer. “Anything?”

Parrish angles the screen so John can see it too. “Gerard Argent has the same address listed on his driver’s license that Chris gave us.”

“Any criminal history?”

“None.” Parrish clicks through a few of the incidents attached to Gerard Argent’s name. He’s listed as the next of kin in relation to Kate’s murder. A few years before that and he reported the theft of a laptop from a café. There’s nothing in that report either. Just bare bones stuff, enough for the insurance claim. The year after Kate’s murder he was a witness in a fatal traffic accident. Parrish opens the list of persons attached to the accident.

John leans forward. “Got a license plate linked to him?”

“Not his,” Parrish says. “Looks like he was a passenger in a 2012 Escalade belonging to a Robert Graham.”

“He local?”

“Not anymore,” Parrish says, clicking onto Graham’s name. “Santa Cruz address. But at the time he was living in Beacon Valley.”

“Address?” John asks, his tone sharpening.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

“An apartment,” Parrish says. No way has Stiles been held in an apartment. Robert Graham isn’t the clean skin Gerard Argent is though. He’s got history for assault, and a bunch of traffic offences. He’s also got a list of at least thirty associates.

“Okay,” John says. “Let’s go through every one of these. See if any of them have local addresses. And run a property check through public records.”

Parrish smiles. “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

John clears his throat, looking embarrassed for a moment. “If I’m overstepping here…”

“You’re not,” Parrish promises him. “Not by a long shot.”

 

***

 

The steaks sizzle on the grill when Parrish turns them. The rain has let up at last, but it’s still overcast. Night is gathering quickly. In the yard, John and Peter are kicking an inflatable ball gently to one another, and Ryan is following it, smiling.

“Not how you thought your week was going to go, right?” Laura asks, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen with a beer in her hand.

“I like to think I’m the kind of guy who can roll with the punches,” Parrish says.

Laura’s smile might be the first genuine one he’s seen from her. “I guess you are.”

“I don’t mind,” Parrish says. “Having John and Ryan stay, and having you and Peter around. I know you guys are doing a wolf thing, right? With Ryan.”

“It’s important for us to be close to pack,” Laura says. “I don’t know if that’s a wolf thing, or just a family thing.”

Parrish makes a non-committal noise.

Laura tilts her head on an angle and regards him curiously. “You don’t have a family. Sheriff?”

“It’s Jordan,” he tells her. “And no, not really. Only child. And I’m not close to my parents. There’s no big story there. We’re just very different people.”

Laura smiles slightly. “I’m sorry.”

Parrish isn’t. He’s always found more depth in friendships than he has in his relationship with his parents. He was adopted, so maybe that’s it. Except he’s never felt any burning need to track down his birth parents either. He never felt like he was missing out on anything by not knowing who they were.

He’s never felt like he was missing anything until right now. The house really is too big for a single guy. All that space empty of everything except potential, and of the ghosts of the Stilinksi family. It feels more acute than ever before, with John and Ryan staying, filling the house with their presence, and with Laura and Peter visiting to see Ryan. Parrish feels like he’s standing on the periphery while these strangers make their first overtures as a tentative family, that he’s not invited, even though it’s all happening under his roof.

Down in the yard, Ryan takes a dive onto the grass and Peter scoops him up and sets him back on his feet.

“Your whole family lived together, didn’t they?”

Laura nods.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“It’s okay. It’s been a long time.” Laura picks at the damp label on her beer bottle. “We’re pack animals. Living together is part of that.” Her expression clouds. “I forgot that, I think, when Derek and I left Beacon Hills, and left Peter too. I was so scared though. All I could think about was running. There’s a part of Peter that will never forgive me for that, probably, however much I’ve tried to make it up to him.”

Parrish looks down into the yard. Peter’s holding Ryan out so John can pick the damp leaves off him. He doesn’t know what to say.

John saves him from having to say anything. “The steaks smell good. Are they done?”

“Yeah,” Parrish says. “Ready when you are.”

 

***

 

Ryan falls asleep on the couch after dinner, rugged up in a fuzzy blanket.

The adults spread out on the floor, with the three file boxes of printouts.

“This is a lot,” Peter says.

“These are all of Robert Graham’s associates,” Parrish says. “Addresses, families, company interests, properties.”

“And Robert Graham is an associate of Gerard Argent?” Laura clarifies.

“That might be overstating it,” Parrish admits. “Robert Graham is the owner of an Escalade that Gerard Argent rode in once.”

Peter and Laura exchange a glance.

“It’s better than nothing,” John says, and grabs out the first thick pile of papers. There’s a brightness in his eyes, a keenness Parrish hasn’t seen before, but one that he recognizes. It’s the look of a cop whose gut is telling him he finally got a break on a case.

They get to work.

 


	14. Empty Future

Stiles is a few months into his pregnancy when one of the hunters leaves the doors to the outside open. Nobody is watching him. Stiles moves hesitantly toward the sunlight, his fingers laced over the bulge of his belly.

He sees concrete.

Feels a breeze.

Starts to hyperventilate as he glimpses outside for the first time in years.

He sees a concrete wall, like a prison. Sees a set of gates, chained and locked. Sees a glimpse of a road beyond, of trees. There’s a car at the gates. A car with a bar of lights on the top of it. Stiles squints, and makes out the logo of the Beacon Valley police.

Oh god.

He’s not ready for this. He hesitates, and then darts forward into the sunlight. Sees, too late, one of the hunters walking toward the gate from a side building. At the same time the cop is getting out of the car. The hunter goes to talk to him through the gate. And then the cop’s gaze falls on Stiles.

 _Help_ , Stiles wants to say. _Help_. But the word won’t come.

The cop says something to the hunter, and points. The hunter turns around.

“Stiles! Get the fuck back inside!”

He stumbles back inside. All the way back into his room. He even closes the door behind himself.

_Stiles._

The hunter called him Stiles, right in front of the cop. Stiles is an unusual name, and Beacon Valley is close to home, and he’s a sheriff’s kid. There’s no way the cop wouldn’t know exactly who he was. No way the hunter would have made a mistake like that. That was never going to be a rescue, then. The cop is on Gerard’s team.

Stiles is so fucking happy he didn’t call for help. Didn’t blow his cover as the docile, obedient omega.

“We’re somewhere near Beacon Valley,” he tells Derek that night, after Gerard has given him a lecture on not going near the outside doors and Stiles has listened and nodded and said he was sorry. “I think maybe this is an industrial estate.”

Derek splays his hand over Stiles’s belly. “If you ever see a chance, you take it, okay?”

“But what about—”

“You _take_ it,” Derek says firmly, eyes flashing. “If you get out, don’t trust anyone, okay? Not if he’s got cops working for him. You go straight to your dad, or you go to Laura, okay?”

“I’m not leaving you here,” Stiles protests.

“Stiles, I haven’t left this basement in two years. If you see a chance, don’t wait for me. Get yourself out of here. Get our cub out of here.” He nuzzles against Stiles’s neck. “Promise me?”

“I promise,” Stiles whispers, his heart beating fast. “I promise.”

 

***

 

The nurse they bring him is also a hunter. Any chance Stiles thought he’d have to try and win her sympathy, to try and get her to pass a message to the outside, ends the second he sees the icy contempt in her eyes. She takes his blood pressure, shows Gerard the baby on her portable ultrasound machine, and makes sure Stiles is eating the right foods so he’ll be able to feed the baby when it arrives.

Male omegas can’t deliver the same way that females can. It’s why so many of them used to die, as recently as a century ago. Too often the choice came down to saving the omega, or saving the baby.

Stiles is terrified when they walk him into the bathroom. It stinks of antiseptic, and it’s cleaner than he’s ever seen it, as though someone’s spent hours scrubbing it down. A plastic-covered bench has been wheeled in from somewhere.

It takes three of the hunters to hold him down so the nurse can anaesthetize him.

The last thing he hears before going under is Derek’s muted howl, coming from the basement.

 

***

 

It’s five days before they let him go back into the basement. His wound hurts when he jolts it with every step. He feels weak and dizzy still, and he’s afraid he’s going to drop the baby.

The moment the hunters leave him, Derek hurries forward. “Stiles!”

“Look,” Stiles says. “Look what we made, Der.”

Derek’s eyes widen as he takes the baby, his expression so soft. He looks younger than Stiles has ever seen him, caught somewhere between wonder and heartbreak.

“Stiles, he’s so _beautiful_.”

“Yeah.” Stiles presses a hand against the dressing on his abdomen. His voice cracks. “Yeah, he is.”

 

***

 

It burns in Stiles, a hot ball of anger in his gut. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. Ryan shouldn’t think that this is _normal_. That at night he gets locked in with Daddy in his room, or with Papa and Daddy in the basement. That if he cries, Stiles picks him up and scurries away with him to some corner, and tries uselessly to shush him until one of the hunters invariably yells to shut that fucking kid up. That if he moves, he makes himself a target. When he should be crawling, should be trying to walk, he’s not. He clings to Stiles during the day, and watches the hunters warily. He jolts with fear when one of them gets too close, eyes shining with tears but no sound coming out of him.

It’s not right.

Stiles tries to treat it like a game. Tries to teach Ryan how to play a game called Quiet as a Mouse. Tries to teach a fucking baby how to make himself invisible.

At night, in the basement, Stiles and Derek tell Ryan stories, and play improvised games with him, but they don’t have toys, and they don’t have books, and that ball of rage inside Stiles grows bigger and bigger, and harder to hide.

It’s not right.

 

***

 

“Well, look at him,” Gerard says, a smile on his face as he watches Ryan toddle across the room and hug Stiles’s knees. “Isn’t he getting big and strong?”

Stiles stoops down to pick Ryan up, and angles his body away so Gerard can’t see him. As though that will offer Ryan any protection.

Gerard just laughs. “No need to coddle the boy, Stiles. We don’t want him to grow up like a scared little puppy, do we?”

No, Stiles doesn’t, but he knows Gerard is talking about something entirely different.

“Will he be as strong as his mutt father, do you think?” Gerard asks.

Stiles doesn’t answer that.

“He’ll be magnificent,” Gerard says. “More vicious and deadly than any other wolf the world has ever seen, once we’ve trained him to heel.”

Stiles nods dumbly. Nods, because if he doesn’t, if he objects, there’s nothing to stop Gerard from taking Ryan away from him. He knows he only still has Ryan because of Gerard’s goodwill, and that goodwill could vanish in a heartbeat.

Gerard crosses over to them. For a moment Stiles thinks he’s going to touch Ryan, but instead his hand settles on Stiles’s shoulder. His thumb rubs over the scar from Derek’s mating bite. “You’re a good boy, Stiles. A good omega. And you’ll breed me an entire pack of attack dogs, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Stiles says, his heart beating faster.

Gerard tightens his grip for a moment, then removes his hand. “Good. Good boy.”

Stiles waits until Gerard has left, and then hurries back to his room with Ryan.

 

***

 

“No, Derek,” Stiles sighs, and rolls his eyes. “This little piggy had roast beef!”

He pinches Ryan’s toe gently, and Ryan smiles up at him.

“And this little piggy had none,” he continues.

“And this little piggy,” Derek says, making his eyes go big for Ryan. “Went wee wee wee all the way home!”

Ryan giggles, and then abruptly dives forward into Derek’s lap and lies frozen.

“Quiet as a mouse,” Stiles whispers, his throat aching. “Good job, kiddo.”

He can’t meet Derek’s eyes. He doesn’t want to see the misery in them. He knows how fucked up it is that he’s twisting Ryan this way, training him up to be unnaturally silent, unnaturally still. Ryan’s too small to have figured out that the basement is the one place he’s allowed to be himself. Or maybe Stiles is too damn good at forcing him to be invisible, and this _is_ Ryan. This little person who’s already so screwed up he doesn’t think he’s allowed to giggle.

Stiles hates Gerard and the hunters, but he hates himself too.

“Listen,” Derek says, righting Ryan and sitting him on his lap. “Wanna hear Papa howl?”

Ryan stares at him solemly.

“All little wolves should learn how to howl,” Derek tells him.

“Der,” Stiles says quietly.

“No.” Derek’s voice is suddenly rough. He clears his throat, and tries to smile. “My basement, my rules.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, his throat aching. “Okay, Papa, teach your boy how to howl.”

 


	15. Empty Scent

There’s an old chemical plant about ten miles out of Beacon Valley. It’s owned by a company registered by Robert Graham. It closed in 2007 and as far as Parrish can tell, it’s not being used for anything now.

For a supposedly empty premises, it’s got a lot of security. The property is enclosed by a cement wall topped with razor wire. There’s a camera at the gate. Parrish barely slows the car down as they drive past. Then he parks further down the road, in the lot of a trucking company, behind the cover of a shipping container.

There isn’t much out here except for the trucking company, and that old fertilizer plant.

Parrish and John wait in the car while Peter and Laura go closer on foot to check the place out.

The rain hits the windshield gently, drops sliding down the glass.

John jiggles his foot as they wait.

Ryan sits in his seat in the back, chewing on an oatmeal cookie.

Peter and Laura are back within minutes.

“Anything?” John asks tersely.

“No scents at all,” Laura says. She passes her phone to Parrish. “But the place is warded.”

Parrish squints at the screen, at the weird graffiti on the outside wall that she’s taken a picture of. “Warded?”

“I think those are runes,” Laura says.

“Runes like _magic_?” John exchanges a glance with Parrish, but it’s hard to be skeptical. Because werewolves.

“Probably to block any scents,” Peter says. “It’s unusual for hunters to use anything supernatural, but the Argents have always thought outside the box. We know they’ve used mountain ash before.”

“What does mountain ash do?” Parrish asks.

“Creates a barrier wolves can’t cross,” Peter tells his, eyes narrowing. “Kate Argent circled our house with it before she set it on fire.”

“Right,” John says, exhaling slowly. “What next?”

“We come back at night,” Peter says. “Find a way in, and rip their throats out.”

Parrish flinches a little at that. Despite knowing, he still sometimes forgets that Peter and Laura aren’t human.

“Getting in might be a problem though,” John says evenly. “That gate looks pretty damn solid.”

They head back toward the main road, and Parrish gets another glimpse of the gate. Solid is a good word for it. The thing looks like it could withstand a tank. It was probably built to. A company manufacturing chemicals in a post 9-11 world? The place would have had to be impenetrable.

“Can you get a warrant?” Laura asks them.

Parrish and John exchange another look.

“No,” Parrish says. “We don’t have any evidence, and we can’t get a warrant just on the hopes we’ll turn some up. No judge would sign off on that.”

“What we need,” Peter muses idly, “is an inside man.”

 

***

 

“This is a terrible idea,” Laura says for the third time in as many minutes, watching Chris Argent’s SUV pull into the driveway.

“It’s not,” Peter tells her. “Trust me.”

“You hate him!”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t know he’s a man of his word,” Peter replies.

Chris Argent climbs out of his SUV and regards the house warily. Parrish steps outside to show him in. Chris’s gaze slides immediately to the Hales, and then back to Parrish and John.

“What’s this about, Sheriff?”

“It’s about your father,” Parrish tells him. “Come and take a seat.”

The living room is still full of case files and printouts. Chris sits in the armchair Parrish directs him to, tapping his fingers on his knee.

“They know,” Laura says without preamble. “They know we’re wolves and you’re a hunter.”

Chris’s eyes widen a fraction. “I was,” he says at last. “I’m out of that game now.”

Peter leans forward slightly, his eyes flashing gold. “Was that before or after Gerard stopped following the Code?”

“Probably after,” Chris says. “I don’t know. I was working out of Sacramento for years.”

“Working,” Peter huffs.

“But you stopped hunting,” John says.

“Victoria and I agreed we didn’t want our daughter in that life,” Chris says. “It’s dangerous.”

“I bet Gerard wasn’t very happy about that,” Peter says, a smile curling the edges of his mouth.

“That’s none of your business,” Chris replies. He turns his gaze on Parrish. “What’s going on here?”

“We believe your father abducted Stiles Stilinksi and is holding him against his will,” Parrish says. “We also believe he’s holding Derek Hale.”

“Why the hell would he do that?” Chris asks.

It’s an interesting question, Parrish thinks. It’s most interesting in that it’s not an outright denial. Chris clearly knows exactly how dangerous, how ruthless his father is. No wonder he didn’t want Allison associating with hunters.

At that moment Ryan peers around the doorway, tiny fingers curling around the jamb. “Grandpa?”

“Hey, kiddo.” John stands up and crosses the room. He lifts Ryan up and sits him on his hip. “You want a sandwich?”

Ryan jams his fingers in his mouth and nods.

Parrish watches Chris’s face. He sees the flicker of understanding in the man’s blue-gray eyes.

John carts Ryan off toward the kitchen.

“The Stilinski kid was an omega,” Chris says dully.

“Yes.” Peter’s smile vanishes. “Your father’s started his own little werewolf breeding program.”

 

 

***

 

“You think he’s onboard?” John asks in a low voice once Chris Argent has left.

“I’m more worried the first person he’s going to call is his father,” Parrish admits.

“He won’t,” Peter says. “Why does nobody listen to me? Chris is some sort of Argent genetic throwback or something. He’s an honest man.”

“We’re risking an awful lot on that, Peter,” Parrish reminds him.

“We’re not risking a thing,” Peter says.

 

***

 

Laura paces up and down in the living room, her hands held at her sides. Parrish notices she doesn’t form fists. Instead she keeps her fingers splayed, as though her claws are itching to appear.

Upstairs, John and Peter are giving Ryan his bath and putting him into bed.

“You don’t trust Peter,” Parrish says in a low voice.

“I don’t trust his _judgment_ ,” Laura says. “Peter’s always been very good at subterfuge. He’s a strategist. It’s comes as naturally to him as breathing. With stakes like this though…” She runs her hands through her hair. “God, I just don’t _know_.”

“Okay,” Parrish says. “But look. We have Ryan now. If Gerard wants to raise his own werewolves to train against you guys, he’s not going to hurt Stiles and Derek in the meantime, is he? He’s not.”

“Unless he decides to throw the whole thing in and just kill them.”

Parrish reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder. She’s so tense she’s almost vibrating. “He’s not going to throw away five years. He’s not.”

“What if he tries to move them? What if we can’t find them again?”

It’s a good point.

“How do you feel about a stakeout?” Parrish asks her.

 

***

 

Parrish and Laura park up in the trucking yard’s lot again. They’re close enough to the old chemical plant that they can just make out the gate through the drizzle. They’ll know if someone comes. More importantly, they’ll know if someone leaves.

Parrish plays with the GPS on the car’s satnav. “You know we’re only about seven miles from Beacon Hills on foot?”

Laura points at the woods. “That way, right?”

“Is this some kind of instinct thing?” Parrish asks her, impressed. “Like how cows stand facing magnetic north or south when they’re grazing?”

For a second he thinks her eyebrows have arched so far they’re going to vanish entirely, and then she laughs abruptly. “Did you just compare me to a cow, Jordan?”

He likes the way she says his name. “Maybe? Accidentally!”

“You’re a real charmer,” Laura tells him dryly.

“I get that a lot,” he says.

She smiles. “Liar.”

They watch the gate.

At two in the morning Peter turns up in Laura’s car and takes over the stakeout.

There’s been no movement from the plant.

Back in Beacon Hills, Laura crashes on the couch and Jordan heads upstairs to the air mattress in the spare room. He passes the main bedroom on the way. John’s left the door open. In the darkness Parrish can just make him out. He’s lying on his back, with one arm curled around Ryan. Ryan’s sprawled over his chest, with his head tucked under his chin. He’s sucking his fingers in his sleep.

Parrish heads to bed. He lies awake for a while, thinking of Stiles. Of the blue-haired kid from the missing person files, and of the thin, pale young man who was so desperate to get back to Derek Hale.

He owes it to both versions of Stiles Stilinksi to get him safely home.

He’s not going to fail him.

Not at any cost.

 


	16. Empty Escape

Gerard brings in a new guy. His name is Lee. He’s a drunk. Stiles knows the signs. He sees the way the guys hands tremble a little, how his eyes stay bloodshot even after he’s had his first coffee. Stiles remembers those things from his dad, from when after his mom died.

Lee doesn’t pay any more attention to Stiles than the rest of the hunters. Stiles is fine with that. Going unnoticed is the only way to win the small freedoms he has. The freedom to leave his room and fix meals for him and Ryan. The freedom to ask for books from Gerard. The freedom to go to the basement when he wants. He lets the hunters think his wants are few. It’s much safer that way. Stiles is almost afraid he’s starting to believe it himself.

And then, one day, Stiles hears the soft clink of a bunch of keys dropping onto the cement floor of his room.

“You want the bathroom?”

“What?” Stiles asks, his heart pounding in his chest.

“You want the bathroom?” Lee asks.

“No,” Stiles says. He fights to keep his gaze off the floor, off those goddamn keys. “Thanks.”

Lee grunts and pulls the door shut.

Stiles sets Ryan on the bed and fusses over his curls for a moment. He’s afraid that if he turns around, the keys won’t be there at all. He’s afraid that if they are there and he looks at them, Lee will suddenly realize and come storming back for them.

“Quiet as a mouse, kiddo,” he whispers to Ryan, and tucks him into their narrow cot. Then he lies down beside him, and finally turns his head to look at the keys.

They’re resting on the floor in a clump.

Stiles waits and waits and waits, but Lee doesn’t come back.

In the end, Stiles creeps out of bed and picks the keys up.

He can’t be found with them on his person.

He can’t.

Plausible deniability, that’s what he needs.

He creeps outside his bedroom to the bathroom. He can hear Lee watching TV from somewhere nearby. Stiles drops the keys carefully behind the toilet, creeps back to his bedroom, and panics all night that someone will find them.

 

***

 

In the morning, the keys are still there.

 

***

 

“Derek,” Stiles whispers that night. “I have keys!”

“What?” Derek’s jaw drops.

“Lee dropped them,” Stiles says. “I think he’s too scared to tell Gerard, or too drunk to notice they’re gone yet. I found them and hid them in the bathroom.”

“Will they get you out of here?” Derek asks.

“I think so.” Stiles squeezes his hand. “I just need to get the code for your cell, and—”

“No!” Derek cups Stiles’s chin in his hands. “No, you said that if there was a way for you to get out, you’d take it.”

“But, Derek, I can—”

“You take it, Stiles!” Derek hisses. “You _promised_!”

“I can’t leave you here, Derek!”

Derek’s eyes flash, and his face transforms into the wolf’s. “You need to get Ryan out of here.”

“Together,” Stiles says, his breath hitching. “Der, we can do that together!”

Derek moves so fast that Stiles doesn’t even know it’s happened until he feels the sting of claws against his throat. He cries out, and flails away from Derek, clapping a hand to the shallow wounds. His skin is slick with hot blood.

Derek looks more like a monster than Stiles has ever known. Suddenly he’s fifteen again, and terrified of the fanged creature looming over him.

Derek _roars_ , and Ryan starts to cry.

The hunters come clambering down the steps.

 

***

 

“He’s going feral,” one of the hunters says. Robert. Stiles hates Robert. “So much for the omega taming him.”

Stiles sits on his bed, one hand clamped to the bandage on his neck, and his free arm curled around a trembling Ryan.

Gerard regards Stiles narrowly. “What did you do, Stiles?”

“N-nothing!” He doesn’t need to fake the tremor in his voice.

“Because you know I need you to roll over for the mutt,” Gerard says. “I need you to be good for him.”

“I know!” Stiles swallows down a sob. “I know that!”

Gerard’s face softens with something that’s almost tender, and he curls his fingers around the back of Stiles’s neck. “I need him to breed you up again, omega. You want that, don’t you? Another pup of his in your belly?”

Stiles nods, tears sliding down his cheeks.

“Of course you do.” Gerard lets go of his neck. “You’re a good boy, Stiles. A good little breeder. Stay away from the mutt for a while, hmm? Give yourself a chance to heal. The boys and I will give him an attitude adjustment in the meantime.”

Stiles’s stomach clenches.

“Get some sleep,” Gerard tells him.

Stiles curls up on the cot, hugging Ryan close to him.

Gerard and Robert close the door.

 

***

 

For three days Stiles keeps to his room.

He hates Derek for this.

Stiles isn’t an idiot. He knows exactly what Derek was doing. Forcing the hunters to keep them apart. Forcing their attention on him, instead of Stiles. He doesn’t want Stiles to visit him in the basement. He doesn’t want the hunters to let him down there. He didn’t want to hurt Stiles. He wanted to force him to run, because there is no better time than now.

Derek has created an opportunity for Stiles, and he’s terrified to use it.

The hunters spend their time in the basement, giving Derek a taste of that promised attitude adjustment. Stiles doesn’t know what it entails exactly, but he feels sick every time the lights flicker and he hears Derek’s pained howl.

Hears it even above the storm that breaks on the third night.

 _Now_ , his gut tells him. _Now_.

“You asshole,” Stiles whispers fiercely, holding Ryan close as he treads carefully toward the bathroom. “You fucking _asshole_.”

Their bond might have been forced, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. And it’s more than some biological imperative anyway. Stiles _knows_ Derek. Stiles _loves_ Derek. Except, right now, he really hates him too.

Stiles picks up the keys from behind the toilet, and hides them under his shirt. He heads for the front door. He feels sick with fear. The space behind him seems to grow larger, seems to loom with every imaginable threat. He’s sure that at any second someone will see him. See him, and understand exactly what he’s doing, and then he’ll be punished, and he knows Gerard won’t let him see Ryan again if he’s caught.

He fumbles with the keys, finds the right one at last, and pushes the door open.

The rain is heavy.

How long has it been since he felt rain?

It’s cold too.

“Quiet as a mouse,” he whispers to Ryan, hurrying toward the main gates.

Ryan whimpers as lightning flares.

Stiles finds the key for the padlock on the gate. Opens it, and then he’s free.

 _Free_.

Holy shit.

He holds Ryan tight and stumbles across the road toward the cover of the trees.

 

***

 

It takes most of the night. Stiles is sure he gets turned around a few times. He’s sure he’s going in totally the wrong direction. But when he finally stumbles out of the trees and onto a road, he sees the old gas station that’s been closed down for years. He remembers stopping in here with his dad, back when the place was still open, on the way back from seeing his therapist in Beacon Valley. It’s not on the main highway, but his dad liked taking this route. Called it the scenic route, but it was mostly because when the gas station was open it served the best milkshakes around.

It was part of their weekly tradition. Stiles would spend an hour sobbing out his grief to his therapist, and then, feeling fragile and wrung out, he’d drink a strawberry milkshake and feel just a little bit better when he was done.

“Daddy!” Ryan wails. “Cold, Daddy!”

“I know, kiddo,” Stiles says. “I know. When we get to grandpa’s, he’s going to make you a nice hot chocolate to warm you right up again, okay?”

Like Ryan even has any idea what hot chocolate is.

Ryan whimpers and hides his face against Stiles’s throat.

“We’re close, baby. We’re so close.”

He sticks to the back roads, diving behind trees and into the undergrowth beside the road if he even catches a glimpse of headlights through the rain. He’s tired, and he’s cold, and he wants Derek, and he wants his dad, and he wants to be _home_.

He cuts through the woods for the last mile and a half, through the edge of the Preserve, though trails his feet remember even in the vicious storm, even though it’s been years.

He’s crying when he clambers over the back fence into his yard. Crying when he taps on the kitchen window, Ryan wailing freely now.

When he sees the beam of a flashlight, Stiles almost collapses in relief.

The kitchen door is wrenched open.

“Dad?” he asks, his voice breaking. “Dad?”

Lightning flashes, and Stiles sees the man’s face.

It’s not his dad.


	17. Empty Plans

The afternoon brings more rain. Ryan stands on the armchair in the living room, leaning up against the back of it so that he can touch the window. He presses his fingers against the glass and follows the meandering paths of raindrops down the pane. John stands beside him, one hand hovering behind the small of his back in case he takes a tumble.

Laura sits cross-legged on the floor, flicking through Stiles’s case file.

Peter is down near Beacon Valley, watching the old plant. Laura’s phone buzzes with the occasional texts he sends.

Parrish watches television. Waiting is the worst. He doesn’t know how the hell John has done it for five years now.

“Can Ryan shift like you?” John asks suddenly, and Parrish pulls his attention away from the television.

“He will,” Laura says. “When he’s a little bigger. Most of us don’t start shifting until we’re about five. It can be sooner though. Family legend has it that Peter was born in wolf form.”

 _Gross._ Parrish is pretty sure his expression is as horrified as John’s.

Laura just laughs.

John rubs Ryan’s back gently. “Guess we’ve got a steep learning curve ahead of us then.”

“It’s easier than you think,” Laura tells him. “With pack.”

“You’re working on the theory we’re going to survive this?” John asks.

It’s a valid question.

“If we don’t,” Laura says, “there’s a pack in Oregon you can take him to get any answers you need. Or, if none of us make it, they’ll take him. They’re good people.”

“I guess that’s something we need to think about,” John says. “What are the chances this is going to have a happy ending?”

“You’re pack, John,” Laura says firmly. “And we’ll do everything we can to make sure you and Stiles are here for Ryan for a very long time.” She shows him a sad smile, one that’s been tempered by bitter expereience. “But it’s good to have a backup plan.”

“I only just found this little guy,” John says. “I’m not sure I’m ready to lose him.”

Parrish turns the remote control over in his hands.

Of course John isn’t ready to lose Ryan. But of course he has to take that risk in order to try and save Stiles.

There’s no backing out.

 

***

 

“Thought we were supposed to be in a drought anyway,” Parrish mutters later, fixing sandwiches in the kitchen with John’s help.

Ryan’s sitting at the kitchen table, watching with undisguised hunger.

“This is Beacon Hills, Jordan,” John says. “The usual rules don’t apply.”

“I’m starting to get that,” Parrish snorts. He holds up the cheese to show Ryan. “Cheese on your sandwich, Ryan?”

Ryan nods. He’s always willing to try any food. It makes Parrish wonder what his life was like before. Aren’t kids this age meant to be fussy eaters?

“Why’d you come here?” John asks, as Parrish cuts a piece of cheese for Ryan to eat while he waits for his sandwich. “It’s an odd choice for a guy your age.”

“Is it?” Parrish shrugs. “I got tired of L.A., I guess. I wanted something with a slower pace.” He catches John’s gaze in time to see John’s rueful smile. “Right? More fool me.”

“Everything you’re doing for us, everything you’ve done…” John clears his throat. “Well, it’s above and beyond.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Parrish tells him. His hand hovers over the knife block, and he notices for the first time that there’s a gap. Where the hell is the big kitchen knife? He checks the sink, doesn’t find it, and grabs the next size down instead to cut the tomatoes. “Okay, so we’ve got pastrami, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. Do you think we’re missing anything, Ryan?”

Ryan sucks on his fingers and shakes his head.

Parrish sets the sandwich down in front of him, and Ryan peels the bread apart to start picking at the insides.

John watches him fondly. “You like that, kiddo?”

“Yum,” Ryan says. “It’s yum.”

“You look so much like your daddy,” John says.

“No blue,” Ryan says, blinking at him.

“You mean your hair?” John laughs. “No, you don’t have blue hair like your daddy does in the photographs, do you? But I’ll bet once he’s back, he’ll let you have any color hair you want.”

Ryan’s eyes widen and he grins.

“Are you training my nephew to be a punk, John?” Laura asks, stepping inside the kitchen.

“Freedom of expression is very important for developing children,” John tells her, his smile belaying his serious tone. “I saw it once in one of the parenting books Claudia made me read when she was pregnant with Stiles. It’s why I have so many pictures of him dressed as a fairy princess astronaut.”

Laura tilts her head. “Makes sense. Even fairy princesses aren’t immune to the vacuum of space.”

John snorts. “Jeez, Laura. You’re gonna love him.”

“Of course I am,” Laura says, like there’s no doubt about it.

 

***

 

In the afternoon, Laura heads out to take over the stakeout from Peter. Peter arrives back home a while later, with a bag of groceries he picked up on the way.

“Nothing,” he tells Parrish and Jordan. “No movement.”

“That something we should be worried about?” John asks.

“I don’t think so,” Peter says. “I told you we could trust Chris.”

Half an hour later Parrish’s phone rings, and he grabs it off the coffee table to answer it. “Parrish.”

“Sheriff. It’s Chris Argent.” The man’s voice sounds rough. “What do you need me to do?”

 

***

 

There’s a copy of the station roster stuck to the refrigerator, and Parrish double-checks it before calling Tara. She’s on a day off, like he thought, and she turns up at the house within half an hour of getting his call.

“Thanks for doing this,” Parrish says.

Tara shrugs her coat off, revealing the holster at her hip. “My childless boss asks me to babysit, and bring my sidearm? Like I could resist that invitation.”

John descends the steps, Ryan on his hip.

“Hi, Sheriff,” Tara says, and then corrects herself. “Mr. Stilinski, I mean.”

“It’s just John,” John tells her. “And this here is Ryan.”

“Hi, Ryan,” Tara says.

Ryan hides his face in John’s shoulder.

They go into the living room, and Tara’s eyes widen when she sees Chris Argent standing there with Peter Hale. Or maybe her eyes widen because she takes in Chris’s shoulder holster, and the very not-hunting-deer firearm he’s sliding into it.

“I think you know everyone,” Parrish says.

“Yes, sir.”

Chris Argent shrugs on his jacket.

“I need you to watch Ryan,” John tells her. “And if we don’t come back by morning, I need you to take him to Oregon.”

“Oregon?” Tara asks.

“Laura wrote the address down,” John says. “There are people there who will look after him.”

Tara nods, and Parrish can see she’s dying to ask what the hell is going on. He doesn’t blame her.

“And if anyone comes to the house to get him, and it’s not one of us, or Laura Hale, I need you to be prepared to shoot your way out,” John says.

Tara’s gaze finds Parrish. “Sheriff?”

Parrish nods.

“Or Chris,” Peter says firmly. “If only Chris comes back, you take the child to Oregon.” Then he glances at Chris and says, his voice dry, “No offence.”

Chris narrows his eyes but says nothing.

“Okay,” Tara says warily. “Only Sheriff Parrish, Sheriff Stilinski, and the Hales.”

John puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. “Or Derek Hale, or Stiles.”

“What?” Tara’s eyes widen. “ _Stiles_?”

“Gonna get my boy back,” John says, his voice gruff. “Gonna bring him home.”

Tara puts her hand over his, her eyes shining with tears. “Oh my god. Let me come with you!”

“I would love nothing more than to have you at my back,” John tells her. “But, Tara, I need you to watch Ryan for me, okay? I need you to watch my grandson.”

She nods, and then reaches out to pull him into a hug. “Be safe, Sheriff. Please be safe.” She releases him and meets Parrish’s gaze. “You too, Sheriff.”

“We’ll do our best,” Parrish says.

John bundles a teary Ryan into Tara’s arms, and kisses him on the forehead. “Be good for Tara, kiddo.”

He doesn’t promise he’s going to get Ryan’s parents.

He doesn’t promise he’ll be back soon.

He doesn’t make any promises at all.

Ryan’s thin wail follows them out of the house.


	18. Empty Threat

Stiles makes it back to the compound before dawn. He hopes the hunters have been distracted enough by Derek. Because Derek must know he’d run. He can hear heartbeats. He must have heard Stiles and Ryan getting further and further away. So of course his stupid, reckless wolf would have done everything he could to keep the hunters from noticing Stiles was gone. To give him a head start.

He holds his breath as he unlocks the gate, and locks it again behind him.

Lightening crashes, and Stiles darts through the rain to the main door.

It’s dark inside, and mostly silent. Stiles stands there, shivering and wet, and then slides his hand under his shirt to feel the handle of the knife he took from the new sheriff’s kitchen.

His dad… his dad _left_?

No, he can’t think of that now. He needs to get Derek and go. He promised Derek he’d get Ryan away safely. He didn’t promise not to come back. Stiles has a key to the basement—he has a key to everything now—but he needs the code to open the magnetic lock of the tiny cell that feeds into the basement.

Too many fucking doors and locks. It reminds him of the video games he used to play with Scott. Different keys, different levels, and a boss in every fucking room.

There are usually at least two hunters left in the compound overnight, but there might be more here tonight if Gerard is still teaching Derek a lesson about hurting Stiles. Gerard himself might still be here. To be honest, Stiles still isn’t sure if the old man has a home outside the compound or if he lives in one of the other buildings on site.

There’s so much he doesn’t know.

He grips the knife and moves quietly through the dark.

He’s near the kitchen when he first sees movement. A men bending down against a silhouette of light. Someone’s going through the refrigerator.

Stiles moves quickly. He doesn’t allow time for doubt. Doesn’t allow time to second guess himself. Because he knows he doesn’t have the courage for this, and he probably doesn’t have the strength either, but he has to try. The one thing he has the element of surprise.

He hopes.

He hooks an elbow around the hunter’s throat. It’s Lee. He stinks of alcohol. Stiles jabs the point of the knife against his jugular. “What’s the code to the cell?”

Lee struggles. “The fuck!”

“What’s the code?” Stiles repeats.

“Seven-six—”

“Well, now,” Gerard says from behind them. “Isn’t this interesting?”

Stiles spins around, jerking Lee with him. “Drop your gun, or I’ll kill him!”

Gerard smiles, and fires.

Lee slumps forward onto the floor, blood spreading from underneath him.

“Welcome home, omega.”

 

***

 

In his head, it all played out so very differently. In his head Stiles is the one who killed Lee, who upgraded his knife to a gun, who worked through every dark room quickly and methodically, who met the boss, who killed the boss, and who escaped the final dungeon with Derek.

It _hurts_.

He’s in the dark again, in the place they put him when they first caught him all those years ago. He thinks his ribs are cracked. Two of his fingers are broken. He hurts so much, and he’s so cold.

“Where’s the kid?”

They come and ask him every so often. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re there all the time, asking the same question, and Stiles just tunes out in between. He can no longer judge the passage of time.

“Where’s the kid?”

“Gone,” Stiles says, and earns a boot in the small of his back for that answer.

“Where?”

“He shifted,” Stiles says, curling into a ball. “In the woods, he shifted, and I made him run away.”

He can almost see it. Can see Ryan howling, shifting, feeling the forest floor under his paws for the first time. A toddler can’t survive in the woods, but a wolf cub can. Yes. That’s how he’s going to remember it. His son, this magical, impossible creature, this _wolf_. Living free, fur dampened by rain and dried again in the sunlight, and running faster than any hunter can follow.

“Liar. Wolves can’t shift this early.”

“He did. He shifted. And you’ll never catch him now.”

It _hurts_.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t know how long it’s been when Gerard finally drags him out of the hole. He’s thirsty, and he’s cold, and the light hurts his eyes.

“He hurt me,” Stiles babbles. “He hurt me, so I ran.”

Worth a shot, right?

“You think you can defy me, omega?” Gerard hisses at him.

Stiles sways on his feet. “Think I already did.”

His head cracks back when Gerard slaps him.

“You’re nothing but a filthy little breeder.”

Stiles squints at the floor.

Gerard grips his chin roughly and forces him to look at him. “I’d put a bullet in your skull right now, except you owe me a pup. You owe me a entire fucking litter of pups!”

The threat should disgust him, but instead Stiles is flooded with warmth. He wants to see Derek. Needs to see him. Needs to hold him and cry, and promise that he took Ryan somewhere safe.

That’s a thing he chooses to believe as well. He can’t know the new sheriff is a good guy, but he said he’d call Dad, and Stiles needs to hold onto that. Needs to picture his dad holding Ryan, making silly faces at him, promising him there aren’t any monsters under the bed. Stiles’s dad is the best dad in the world. If Stiles can’t raise his son, he wants his dad to do it.

_“Be whoever the hell you want to be, kiddo.”_

_“Love you, son.”_

_“Blue hair, Stiles, really?_ Blue _?”_

It breaks Stiles’s heart that he couldn’t give Ryan a good start in life, but he knows his dad can give him a good future. Somewhere far, far away from here.

“I was nice to you, Stiles,” Gerard hisses. “Too goddamn nice. Gave you a mate, gave you a roof over your head, and you _ran_. I should have let that dog tear you into shreds instead.”

Stiles licks his split lip.

“Well,” Gerard says with a short, bitter laugh. “Think on this. The next time you defy me, I’ll throw you back in the basement with the mutt. And then you’ll see how happy he is to see you when he smells you full of another dog’s pup.”

Stiles’s heart stutters. “Wh-what?”

“He’s going to try to rip your fucking throat out.” Gerard’s fingers dig into his chin. “I won’t let that happen, of course. I’ll stop him before he kills you. But only just before.”

Stiles shudders, and cold tears slide down his face.

 

***

 

His room has been cleared out of everything except a blanket. Stiles wraps it around himself and curls up on the cold floor. He hears Derek howl once or twice, the sound very faint. He tells himself that this is okay. That as long as Ryan is okay, the rest doesn’t matter.

It’s a lie, he thinks.

He wonders if Derek really will hate him when he’s carrying someone else’s baby.

He wonders if he’ll hate himself.

 

***

 

It’s night when they bring him out of his room and tell him to strip his clothes off. He does, trying to ignore his audience as much as possible.

“You ever see an omega bitch before?” one of the hunters brags.

“No.” The newcomer’s voice is unimpressed, a little bored.

“You should see him when he’s in heat,” the hunter laughs. “He’d hump your leg like a dog.”

 _Not_ your _leg, asshole_ , Stiles wants to say, but he’s already hurting enough.

They don’t lead him downstairs to the basement. They lead him further back into the building, past the bathroom, past the kitchen, past the rooms Stiles isn’t allowed inside.

A door swings open at the end of the hall, and Gerard is waiting.

One of the hunters pushes Stiles through the doorway.

There’s a wolf inside. A growling, pacing wolf, wearing his monster’s face. It’s not Derek.

“No, please,” Stiles says. “Please!”

Gerard’s smile is cold. “You’d better roll over and take it, omega. This one’s feral.”

He pulls the door shut behind himself.

“Please don’t,” Stiles tells the wolf, backing into the corner. “Please don’t.”

The wolf steps closer, a clawed hand extended.

Stiles closes his eyes and a raw sob wrenches out of him.

 


	19. Empty Fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back at work tomorrow, so back to one chapter a day from then. But the end is in sight!

Parrish cuts the lights before they reach the compound, driving past and pulling up in the parking lot of the trucking yard. He peers through the rain-spotted windshield at the gate of the compound. There’s no movement that he can see, but god only knows what the hell is going on behind those walls.

He checks his Glock. Checks he’s got spare ammo.

In the passenger seat, John’s doing the same.

Laura leans forward into the gap between seats.

“You sure you don’t want a gun?” Parrish asks her.

“Wouldn’t know how to use one,” she tells him. She holds out her hand, and Parrish’s eyes widen as her fingernails extend into brutal-looking claws.

“Holy shit,” Parrish says, his heart beating faster.

Headlights arc down the road as the black SUV pulls up to the gates. A man appears at the gate, and Chris Argent climbs out of the SUV. Words are exchanged.

A moment later Chris climbs back into the car, the gates are opened, and the SUV drives through.

Parrish checks his watch. 6.21 p.m.

Chris said to give him an hour to get the gate open for them. If not, they’re going to use bolt cutters and go in shooting.

 

***

 

They vest up.

 

***

 

Parrish doesn’t know what he expects.

He gets silence.

He gets the rain pattering on the windshield. He gets John jiggling his leg. He gets Laura’s claws digging into his seat.

Fifty-one minutes later, he gets Chris appearing at the gate of the compound, unlocking the chain, and leaving the gate ajar.

 

***

 

There’s nobody in the forecourt of the compound when they arrive. They head for the main building. The door is closed but unlocked, and they slip inside silently.

The interior is stark and bare. Concrete floors, no windows, and the place is lit by harsh fluorescent lights that flicker. It smells of dust, and all Parrish can think of is how this is where Ryan was born. This is the world he knows, the place where he took his first steps.

Driving over here, he and John had talked about what to do with the hunters. Arrest them and open themselves to charges of trespass and assault and unlawful detention? Arrest them and risk people asking _why_ they were holding Derek Hale and Stiles? Arrest them and risk outing werewolves to the world at large?

Or make the problem go away?

Both he and John are men of the law. Neither of them are naïve enough to think that law and justice are the same thing. They’re also not naïve enough to think that vigilantism is the answer. Because when you step over a line, when you take the law into your own hands, what are you then? You’re the problem, not the solution. You’re corrupt, no better than the criminals you’re hunting.

Except now, thinking of Ryan in this god-awful place, Parrish knows he’ll look the other way if John puts a bullet in Gerard Argent’s face, or Laura rips him open with her claws. And, if he gets the chance, Parrish will kill him himself and worry about his conscience later.

A faint scream echoes down the hallway. It’s accompanied by laughter and then, moment later, by an unearthly howl coming from somewhere in the bowels of the compound.

“Derek!” Laura whispers, her eyes flashing red. She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment. “I can hear at least ten heartbeats, apart from ours.”

Meaning there are at least six hunters in the building.

They creep further into the building. Laura’s expression becomes sharper, her mouth turned down in what looks like disgust. It’s only when he hears the tail end of a conversation that Parrish realizes Laura has heard a lot more.

“…to him squealing like a little omega bitch!” The man laughs. “That new dog’s fucking him _hard_!”

They approach the open door to the room where the men are talking.

“I don’t hear nothing now,” a second man says. “What if it’s killed him?”

“Grant is supposed to be checking on him.”

“You trust that idiot?”

Parrish and John and Laura step into the doorway just as the two men attempt to leave the room.

“Drop your weapons,” Parrish says.

They don’t.

John puts a bullet in the first guy’s chest. The second guy is already flinging himself out of the way. Parrish wings him, and the guy lands on the floor, does an awkward roll, and comes up shooting at Parrish.

Laura knocks Parrish aside, and dives toward the hunter, claws out. She brings her arm back, then sweeps it forward in a tight arc, slashing the man’s throat. He slumps back onto the ground, blood spraying.

Parrish’s heart skips a beat.

Laura turns around to look at him.

She doesn’t look human. Her face looks like a monster’s. Ridged, misshapen, fangs protruding from her mouth, and coarse hair sprouting from her cheeks. Her eyes are bright red. There’s a part of Parrish that thinks he should be terrified—she’s a walking horror movie cliché—but he’s not. Maybe he’s compartmentalizing, because he’s hasn’t got the time to be scared right now. Or maybe it’s because, despite his steady teenage diet of B-grade horror movies, he knows that Laura is no monster.

“Thanks,” he says instead, and steps forward to help John divest the dead hunters of their weapons.

Laura’s eyes flash again.

They head for the basement.

 

***

 

To Gerard Argent’s credit, it takes him no time at all to realize exactly what’s going on.

“You hear him screaming, Derek? Your mate? You hear him screaming as some other dog rapes his omega ass?” The smirk on the man’s face freezes as he turns when Parrish, John and Laura descend the steps to the basement, and then his face mottles with rage. And to his credit, he knows exactly where to place the blame.

“Christopher,” he says, pulling his firearm out and shooting his son square in the chest. “You traitor.”

Chris hits the floor of the basement.

“Well now,” Gerard says. “If it isn’t the _law_.”

There’s a lock on the bars that make up the door. Laura rips it off and flings it into the dust.

Gerard and the three hunters with him step away from what can only be Derek Hale, and point their weapons at Parrish, John and Laura.

Parrish keeps his gaze fixed on Gerard and his men, but the glimpse he caught of Derek Hale was more than enough. Derek’s bound to a length of chain link fence bolted to the wall, with what looks like jumper cables clamped to whatever flesh the hunters have managed to pinch up. There’s an array of car batteries on the floor around him, and some sort of other electrical equipment Parrish really doesn’t want to think about too hard. A cord also snakes through the bars of the door. It looks like it’s wired into the mains.

“You sick fuck,” John says.

“I’m not the monster here, Sheriff,” Gerard says, his voice hard. “This animal killed my daughter!”

“Your daughter killed our entire family!” Laura growls.

“You are an abomination,” Gerard tells her. “Your kind need to be wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Laura growls. “You first.”

She steps forward into the basement, and then all hell breaks loose.


	20. Empty Shot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting earlier than expected because some idiot woke up half an hour before her alarm...

“Stiles? _Stiles_?”

The words cut through his rising panic like static, and Stiles forces his eyes open to stare at the wolf standing in front of him.

“Don’t be scared.” The words are slurred a little because of his fangs. That clawed hand hovers in front of Stiles, like the wolf is afraid to touch. “My name is Peter Hale. I’m sorry, I can’t shift back because of the wolfsbane.”

“Peter Hale?” Stiles asks, his breath shuddering out of him.

The wolf nods, eyes flashing gold. “We’re here to get you out. Laura, and your father, and Sheriff Parrish.”

Stiles starts to tremble.

“Ryan’s safe,” Peter tells him.

Stiles slides down the wall, drawing his legs up when he hits the floor and hiding his face in his knees. He’s not sure if it’s relief or disbelief that’s brought him down.

“Stiles?” Peter crouches down in front of him.

“Oh my god,” Stiles mutters. “I’m meeting my mate’s family and I’m _naked_.”

There’s silence from the wolf.

When Stiles looks up, Peter is grinning around his fangs.

“I knew I’d like you, pup,” he says, and pats Stiles on the knee. “Now, unless we give these assholes a show, they’re going to come through that door and check what’s going on.”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath.

“How good are you at screaming?” Peter asks him, head on an angle.

“Boss level,” Stiles says.

“Good,” Peter says. “Let them hear it.”

Stiles opens his mouth and screams.

 

***

 

There’s a part of Stiles that doesn’t believe this can be real. The last five years have taught him that hope never is. There’s a part of him that thinks he still in the hole or, worse, that he’s really locked in with an enraged alpha werewolf and something terrible is happening and he’s gone into some kind of a fugue state, or a fantasy.

It’s not difficult to cry out when Peter growls.

In between the noises they make, Peter stops and tilts his head like he’s listening for something. Eventually he comes and crouches down by Stiles again.

“I don’t know exactly what’s happening out there, but our job is to get to the exit, okay? I need you to stay behind me.”

“Why? Are you bullet proof?”

“Not exactly,” Peter says around his fangs. “But I can take a few hits.”

“You don’t even _know_ me.”

“Stiles,” Peter says. “You’re _pack_.”

Stiles sucks in a shuddering breath and holds it. He scrubs his wet cheeks with the heels of his hands, and nods. “Yeah. Pack.”

“Okay,” Peter says. “So now we wait.”

He straightens up again and goes to stand beside the door.

When it’s been quiet for too long, when the hunter opens the door with his taser at the ready, when Peter moves faster than he can and drags him into the room… when Peter slashes the hunter’s throat with his claws, Stiles doesn’t even flinch.

He’s done crying.

He’s done being scared.

Ryan’s waiting for him to come home.

He climbs to his feet, his heart pounding. He crouches down over the hunters’ body, and tugs the man’s sidearm from his holster. He flicks the safety off. Then he steps over the spreading pool of blood on the floor, and follows Peter from the room.

 

***

 

They’re almost at the door when they hear the muted burst of gunfire from the basement. Peter turns, gold eyes blazing. He throws back his head and _roars_ , and okay wolfy instincts, but way to give away their position, right?

“Basement,” Stiles says.

Peter flashes his fangs. “No! My job is to get you to the car!”

Except _Derek_ is in the basement. And maybe his dad too.

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees. “And then you’ll go back and join the fight, right? And I will too, I’ll be right behind you, because that’s my _pack_ down there, so let’s just cut out the wasted trip to the car, and go to the basement _now_!”

Peter tilts his head to listen, and whatever he hears must be worse than Stiles can imagine, because he doesn’t even argue.

“Stay behind me!” he growls.

They head for the basement steps.

 

***

 

It comes to Stiles like the flashes of some terrible nightmare. His dad, and Sheriff Parrish, and a wolf who can only be Laura Hale. Gerard and his hunters. And Derek, chained up while electricity courses through him.

For years Stiles’s world has been so confined, so small drawn, that for a moment he doesn’t know how to force it to expand to include all these _people_. For years it was just him. Just him, and sometimes Derek, and then it was Ryan.

There’s too much happening, too much to see, too many people here to protect. Stiles’s loyalties are divided. His attention is. Derek or Dad? Derek or Dad? He is overwhelmed with choice, and he freezes.

It comes in flashes.

Laura is growling, black blood oozing out of a hole in her thigh. She has her clawed hand curled around a hunter’s throat.

Sheriff Parrish is on the ground, wrestling a gun off a guy. Maybe. Both their hands are clenched tight around the weapon. As Stiles watches, he sees Parrish elbow the hunter in the face.

His dad is standing in the middle of it all, gaze fixed on the hunter he just shot.

Peter throws himself into the fray.

Flashes.

Stiles sees Gerard Argent raise his gun. Sees it pointed at his _dad_.

His heart stops.

 

***

 

“You’re too excitable,” his dad tells him for the millionth time ever. “This isn’t a video game, kid. This is the real thing. You need to take a breath and hold it. Let it out again as you pull the trigger.”

Stiles squints at the paper target.

“And when we say pull,” his dad begins.

“We mean squeeze gently,” Stiles finishes for him.

This is his third weekend at the range, and most of the guys there look at his dad like he’s crazy for bringing Stiles here. Stiles, the omega. And not just that, but because Stiles is also a bundle of excess energy and he has the attention span of a sleep-deprived toddler. And shooting in real life is a lot harder than in video games. It also takes a lot more preparation. And also, in video games, Stiles doesn’t really care if he sprays an entire wall with bullets in order to get a shot. In real life, he’s not allowed to do that. He’s supposed to _concentrate_ , and to _relax_.

It’s harder than he thought it would be, and not really as fun as he tells Scott and the other kids at school. But he likes spending time with his dad, and he likes it when he does a good job and his dad tells him so.

“You got it?” his dad asks.

Stiles nods, which then means he totally has to get the target in his sights all over again.

“When you’re ready,” his dad says.

Stiles squeezes the trigger.

 

***

 

Stiles squeezes the trigger.

Gerard stumbles back, clutching at his shoulder.

Stiles exhales. Squeezes the trigger again.

He has tunnel vision now, and he’s seen this horror movie a thousand times, hasn’t he? Things like Gerard, you take your eye off them and they get up again.

He squeezes the trigger.

This time Gerard hits the floor.

Stiles moves forward, not even blinking. Points the gun in Gerard’s twisted, pain-filled face.

There are a thousand things he wants to say, but they all come down to the same sentiment:

_Rot in hell._

_Rot in fucking hell._

The words won’t come though.

Doesn’t matter.

Stiles squeezes the trigger.

 

***

 

Warm arms wrap around him from behind, and the gun drops from his cold fingers.

“Oh, kid. Jesus, Stiles. That’s enough, okay? That’s enough.” His dad turns him around, his hands on Stiles’s shoulders, then his neck, his face. Big, warm hands. “ _Stiles_.”

“Dad,” he says, blinking at him through his tears. “Daddy?”

John sobs, and pulls him close, and Stiles buries his face in his neck and breaks down.

 


	21. Empty Road Home

The shooting stops, and for a long while Parrish can’t hear anything except the ringing in his ears, and the thump of his heart. There’s so much epinephrine coursing through his system that for a moment he can’t even tell if he’s been injured or not.

He waits to feel a rush of pain… and there’s nothing.

Parrish gasps for breath, the dead weight of the hunter pressing down on him. He can feel hot blood seeping out between them. The hunter’s blood, then, not his. It’s…

It was the hunter’s life or his.

Parrish isn’t going to second-guess himself.

Peter, still wolfed out, reaches down and drags the dead hunter off him.

“We okay?” Parrish asks, climbing to his feet. “We all okay?”

In the corner of the room, John is tugging his jacket around a trembling Stiles.

Laura is limping toward Derek. She wrenches the cables from the car batteries with a growl, and Peter tugs the cable that was wired into the mains free. Derek slumps in his bonds.

“I’ve got you,” Laura tells him, cupping his cheeks with her hands. “I’ve got you, Der.”

She begins to carefully remove the sharp teeth of the jumper cables from his skin, making a tiny whining noise whenever he flinches.

Peter crosses the floor to Chris Argent, and nudges him with his foot. “Chris?”

Chris coughs, and tugs his shirt open to reveal the vest underneath. His shaking fingers find the bullet meant for his heart.

Peter reaches down a hand to him, and Parrish watches as Chris reaches up. Clawed fingers clamp around Chris’s wrist, and Peter hauls him to his feet.

Parrish goes to help Laura. Derek turns his face toward him, and growls weakly.

“He’s a friend, Der,” Laura says. She wrenches a chain free, and Derek sags forward from the frame.

“Stiles?” he asks, his voice rasping and raw.

Laura and Parrish help ease him down onto his knees.

Then Stiles is kneeling in front of him, scrawny frame bundled up in John’s jacket, his hand on the back of Derek’s neck, drawing him close. Parrish can see the moment the tension starts to leave Derek’s body, as he presses his face into the crook between Stiles’s neck and shoulder and inhales deeply. He breathes his fill before leaning back again.

Stiles presses his free hand against Derek’s cheek, wincing a little.  

Derek catches Stiles’s hand, and Parrish sees the twisted, swollen fingers for the first time. Derek brushes his own fingers against them gently.

“Hey,” Stiles whispers.

“Hey,” Derek says.

They both look too wrecked to move.

Of course it’s Peter who breaks the strange peace of the moment.

“Get them out of here,” he says. “Don’t say anything to anyone until we get back. In the meantime, Chris and I have got a meth lab to build.”

 

***

 

It’s when they’re leaving that Parrish really sees it for the first time. Sees what five years has done to Derek. Sees the wary animal. When the cold rain hits his face, he freezes, muscles tensed as though he’s ready to run.

Laura takes him by the arm and gentles him forward, across the courtyard and toward the gate.

Stiles is walking close behind him, with John’s arm around his shoulders. He almost walks into Derek when Derek stops suddenly just on the other side of the gate.

The night is dark, the cloud cover heavy, and it takes Parrish a second to realize what’s tripped Derek up, figuratively at least. The wide shoulder between the gate and the asphalt is dotted with clumps of stringy grass, and Derek has stepped on one.

Five years is a hell of a long time without rain, without grass.

Laura guides Derek across the road, up toward the parking lot of the trucking company. She’s still limping, and it seems like it’s getting more pronounced with every step.

“Laura?” Parrish asks.

“Wolfsbane,” she tells him through gritted teeth.

“We need to get you to the hospital.”

“No!” She flashes him a smile that looks more like a grimace. “Just let me get Derek to the car, and I’ll take care of it.”

“It’s a bullet wound!”

This time her smile is sharp with mischief. “And I’m a mythical creature.”

It’s a hell of a fair point.

When they get to the car, Stiles climbs into the back with Derek and John.

Laura leans on the hood for a moment, tapping her claws against her thigh. “How much of a battlefield medic are you, Sheriff?”

“What do you need me to do?” he asks warily.

Laura digs a lighter out of the pocket of her jeans, and then a bullet. “Gonna need you to crack the casing open, set fire to the powder, and plug my wound with the ash.”

“That hardly sounds like something a doctor would recommend,” Parrish comments, digging his Swiss army knife out of his pocket.

“Probably not,” Laura agrees, and slashes her jeans open with her claws.

Digging around in a girl’s thigh with the blade of his Swiss army knife isn’t the most disgusting thing Parrish has done, but it’s up there. The most astonishing thing though, is when he plugs the ashes into her wound, and the strange black lines that extend from her wound like a spiders’s web immediately fade away. The wound closes over while Parrish holds the flickering lighter close.

“That’s amazing,” he says, and then hisses as the wheel of the lighter burns his thumb.

Laura’s smile fades into an expression Parrish can’t read. “Let’s get back to Beacon Hills,” she says, “before Peter and Chris blow this place to hell.”

 

***

 

“It scares me a little how good Peter is at all this,” Parrish says as they head back toward Beacon Hill.

“Scares me too,” Laura says, her mouth twitching in what feels like only the semblance of a smile.

She’s tired, Parrish thinks. They’re all tired.

John’s riding in the backseat with Derek and Stiles.

The wipers flash across the windshield. Parrish glances into the rearview. He would have thought Stiles and Derek would both be drinking in the scant glimpses of the outside world the night affords them. Instead, Derek is curled away from the window, leaning into Stiles’s space. Stiles is resting his head against Derek’s shoulder, and clutching John’s hand at the same time. He looks pale and shaky still.

Parrish fixes his gaze on the road again.

He wants to ask Laura how they’re going to _do_ this. Not how the hell they’re going to explain away what happened in Beacon Valley tonight—Parrish has a feeling it’s going to have a lot to do with a massive explosion at the meth lab Peter is currently putting together—and not even how they’re going to explain the magically reappearing Stiles Stilinski to the population of Beacon Hills. Parrish actually thinks that Peter probably has a plan there as well. He seems like the sort of man who keeps at least three plans for any possibly eventuality. No, what Parrish wants to know is how they’re going to do this. For the past few days—has it really only been a few days?—Parrish’s house has become home to John, to Ryan, and pretty much to Laura and Peter as well. What happens now?

Parrish helped bring this family together. He’s selfish enough to want to be a part of it too.

The realization is a little unexpected, but it’s not exactly shocking. Parrish is fairly certain the last few days have stripped him of the ability to be shocked by anything again. Ever.

He takes the exit for Beacon Hills, the road winding upward through the trees. The headlights illuminate the silver flashes of the rain.

“Dad!” Stiles gasps from the back seat, body jerking suddenly.

“You okay, kiddo?”

“Yeah. Just… all of a sudden it didn’t feel real.”

Parrish glances across at Laura. Her face is turned away slightly, angled toward the window, but he see her throat bob as she swallows.

It’s going to be a long road ahead.

 


	22. Empty Sleep

Stiles’s heart is racing by the time they get to the house.

His dad’s been talking to him in a low, calm voice since they hit the edge of Beacon Hills, because he can apparently still tell when Stiles is getting overwhelmed, can still tell when he’s skirting so close to the edge of a panic attack that he can barely breathe.

“He’s okay,” his dad says again for what might be the hundredth time, but Stiles still doesn’t believe it. Can’t. “He’s okay, kiddo.”

When Sheriff Parrish opens the door, when Stiles sees Tara waiting there, when he sees Ryan crashed out on the couch of a living room that’s just familiar enough to feel weird, his knees buckle. He stumbles, and catches himself on the edge of the couch. Leans forward and rubs his thumb along Ryan’s cheek.

“Hey, Ryan,” he whispers, his voice cracking. “Hey, baby boy.”

His thumb leaves a dirty smudge against Ryan’s skin.

Ryan blinks awake. “Daddy? Daddy!”

He reaches his small arms out for Stiles like there’s nothing more certain in the world that the fact his daddy would come back for him.

“Papa’s here too,” Stile mumbles, holding him tight. “Papa’s here.”

Ryan shoves back from Stiles. “Papa!”

Derek sinks to his knees beside them.

God, they’re so filthy, leaving streaks of dirt and blood all over their son, all over the couch, and the hardwood floors.

“Okay,” his dad says at last. “Come on, Stiles. Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?”

No, because Stiles is never going to let go of Ryan ever again. Never, ever again.

“Derek,” Laura says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Come on.”

Stiles feels a spike of panic rush through him, and Derek growls lowly.

“You can both stay here,” Laura says, her voice calm. “Together, and with Ryan. But you need to clean up first, and then we can talk, or you can sleep, or eat. But you’re leaving dirty marks all over Sheriff Parrish’s floor.”

Derek stands first, and then helps Stiles to his feet. Stiles’s cracked ribs hurt from lifting Ryan, but he doesn’t care. He needs to hold him forever, to brush back his curls, to check he’s okay, he’s fine, he’s _here_. He knows exactly how irrational it is. A few days ago he left Ryan in the care of a stranger and now, surrounded by people who’ve proven themselves to him by risking their own lives to save him, and the thought of handing Ryan over for the few minutes it will take to shower is gut wrenching.

“Dad,” he says. “Dad, I…”

“Let me take Ryan, Stiles,” his dad says, voice calm but firm. “Just for a few minutes, and then I’ll give him straight back, okay?”

Stiles nods, and swallows painfully. His dad takes Ryan, and Ryan seems happy enough to go, but—

Happy.

Ryan’s never happy though, is he? He doesn’t even know what that feels like. He’s quiet and complacent, but he’s not _happy_.

They go upstairs.

Derek sits on the edge of the bath while Stiles showers. He scrubs at his skin and his hair, and the water around his feet turns gray before it finally runs clear. He doesn’t know what to say to Derek, or if he should say anything at all. He’s too tired to think now about how suddenly his world has shifted, how he’s here instead of there, how he should be feeling safer but everything seems much bigger and more terrifying now. Even something like having two different shampoos to choose from seems overly fucking complicated.

And whenever he blinks, he sees himself shooting Gerard Argent in the face again.

He climbs out of the shower, and Derek takes his place.

It’s Stiles’s turn to sit on the edge of the bath.

He might not know what to say to Derek, but he needs to be close to him.

His dad brings them clean track pants and shirts, and Stiles dresses and stares at himself in the mirror. He’s thin and gaunt.

Derek turns the shower off, and towels himself off and dresses in silence. Stiles isn’t the only one who can’t think of words then. But Derek curls his fingers around the back of Stiles’s neck, and bumps their foreheads gently together, and that seems like more than words could convey anyway.

There’s a light knock on the door, and it opens a fraction.

“Do you guys want something to eat?” It’s Laura.

“Just…” Derek’s voice rasps. “I just want to sleep.”

“Me too,” Stiles manages.

They’re sleeping in Stiles’s dad’s room. Well, in what Stiles guesses is now Sheriff Parrish’s room, except there’s an open suitcase on the floor and a bunch of toys scattered around, and Stiles’s dad is making the bed while Ryan clings to his leg.

“Me and Ryan have been staying in here,” his dad says. “I’ll take the couch, give you boys your space. If you’re okay to…?”

“Yes,” Stiles says. “Yeah.”

At some point he’s going to have to have that talk with his dad. Explain that their mating was forced, but that Derek never… Derek never forced him.

There’s a first aid kit on the dresser.

“Let me look at your fingers before you go to sleep,” his dad says.

Stiles sits on the end of the bed, and Ryan climbs into his lap. His dad sits on one side of him, and Derek sits on the other. His dad takes Stiles’s hand into his lap and inspects it.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“Cracked ribs, I think.” Stiles closes his eyes as Derek’s warm hand slides under his shirt, finds the source of his pain and draws it gently out of him.

“No sharp stabbing when you breathe?”

“No. If anything was punctured, I’d know by now.”

His dad tapes his fingers carefully. “We’ll have to get these looked at.”

“Not now though.”

“No,” his dad confirms. “Not now.”

Stiles opens his eyes again to find his dad staring at his face. He looks like he’s about to cry. “Dad?”

“Kid, I missed you so much.” His dad puts an arm around, and draws him close. Presses a kiss to the top of his head. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I’m sorry.” Hot tears slide down his cheeks. “I’m sorry we went into the Preserve that night! And Scott didn’t even want to go and it’s my fault he’s—”

“Shh,” his dad says. “Don’t talk like that. You did nothing wrong. You did nothing wrong, kiddo, and we are going to talk about this. We are. But right now you’re tired, and you’re in shock, and you need to be with your son, okay? Everything else we can deal with later, but this little guy here has missed you.” He looks at Derek. “Both of you.”

Derek’s expression softens, losing that hard, guarded edge that he always wears around everyone except Stiles and Ryan. Except the only other people Stiles has seen him interact with have been hunters.

“Sleep, okay?” his dad says.

“Yeah.” Stiles lets his dad help him up, walk him around to the side of the bed. And pull the covers back for him.

He’s already asleep, right? This is a dream.

Derek slides under the covers with him.

“If you need anything, I’m right downstairs.”

“Yeah,” Stiles murmurs.

His dad flicks the light off and closes the door with a snick.

In the darkness, Ryan squirms in the warm space between them. “Daddy! Quiet as mouse?”

“No,” Stiles tells him, his voice cracking. “Well, except it’s bedtime though, so kind of?”

Derek reaches over and cards his fingers through Ryan’s curls. “Do you remember how to howl, Ryan?”

Ryan wriggles, and sucks in a big breath. “Woo! Papa, _awoooo_!”

“Such a big, strong wolf,” Derek says. “How about you give us another big howl, and then it’s time for sleep?”

“Awooo!” Ryan yawns halfway through, and snuggles up against Derek.

Derek shifts him so that Ryan is cuddling his chest. Stiles shifts closer. Derek’s arm comes around him, and Stiles rests his cheek on Derek’s shoulder. They join hands over Ryan’s small, warm body. Ryan snuffles as he drifts off to sleep.

“Is it real, Der?” Stiles asks.

Derek squeezes his fingers. “I think… I think it is.”

For the first time in longer than he can remember, Stiles sleeps without dreaming.

 


	23. Empty Answers

John gets Stiles and Derek upstairs to shower.

Tara watches them go, mouth pressed shut firmly as though she needs to physically hold back her questions.

“Thank you,” Parrish tells her, hideously aware that the front of his shirt is stained with blood. A lot of blood. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to tell you about tonight, and I know I have no right to ask for your silence—”

She stops him by holding up a hand. “Sheriff. Stiles is home. Whatever you all did to make that happen…” She shrugs. “You don’t have the right to ask for my silence, but you have it anyway. I wasn’t even here tonight.” She raises her eyebrows. “Unless you need an alibi?”

“I’ll keep you posted on that,” Parrish says.

Parrish isn’t sure that a promise of official corruption and perjury should make him feel quite so warm inside. But hell, it’s too late and he’s too tired to worry about whether or not this is the start of a very slippery slope. He sure as hell bets there are ex-cops doing hard time right now who’ve convinced themselves that the lines they crossed were necessary. Which isn’t to say that Parrish regrets anything that happened. He just… he just doesn’t want to kid himself that he was on the side of the angels tonight or whatever. Gerard Argent and his hunters were evil, but killing them doesn’t make Parrish good. It doesn’t work like that. Parrish got his hands dirty tonight, and that’s something he’s going to have to learn to live with.

But seeing Ryan’s face when he realized his daddy and his papa were here?

Yeah. So maybe that moral battle’s not going to be as much of a struggle as Parrish expects.

He sees Tara out, and then joins Laura in the kitchen where she’s brewing coffee. She holds a mug out to him, and he takes it.

“Thanks.”

“You could use a shower yourself, Sheriff.”

“I’ll get there.” He sips his coffee. It’s strong and sweet. “And it’s Jordan.”

Laura nods, and Parrish is a little disappointed that she doesn’t repeat his name back to him.

“I don’t know where we’re going from here,” Parrish says. “You and Peter, you live in the apartment above the shop, right? You don’t have room for Derek and Stiles and Ryan there. And it’s probably not a good idea to break them up.”

“I think it’d be impossible,” Laura says, shrugging. She leans back against the counter and curls her fingers around her mug. “They’re bonded.”

“So?”

“Wolves bond for life.”

“Jesus. Does John know that?”

Laura’s gaze flicks to a point over Parrish’s shoulder, and then back again. “He does now.”

Parrish turns in time to see John’s grave expression as he steps into the kitchen. “He’s _twenty_. They took him when he was fifteen. He hasn’t even _had_ a life yet, and you’re telling me he can’t break the bond?”

“I’m telling you he won’t want to break the bond.” Laura groans. “God, it sounds so creepy in human terms, but when wolves bond, it creates a sort of symbiosis? They need each other. It’s instinctual in them now.”

“Stiles isn’t a wolf,” John says.

“No, but he’s bonded to one.”

“So you’re telling me that no wolf has ever broken a bond?”

“Of course they have,” Laura said. “By killing their mate. Again, that sounds incredibly creepy, but we were a brutal society as recently as a few centuries ago. But then, so were you.” She sets her mug down. “I know this isn’t what you wanted for your son. It’s not what I wanted for Derek either, to be _forced_. But, John, please just give them a chance to heal. Give them a chance to show you that the bond can be a good thing, however it was made.”

“It was made because your brother bit my son,” John says firmly. “That’s right, isn’t it? I saw the scar on his neck.”

Laura’s eyes flash red. “Derek wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t have a choice. So before you decide he’s a rapist, maybe we should wait until we hear the facts.”

“The fact is my son was pregnant at _seventeen_.”

Laura growls.

“Okay,” Parrish says, stepping between them. “We are not doing this now. You’re both too upset. John, I know nothing about this is right or fair, but Derek was as much a prisoner as Stiles was. Let’s just keep that in mind for tonight, okay? Who are you really blaming here, huh?”

John’s face twists. “I didn’t-- I didn’t _protect_ him.”

Parrish puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “It’s not your fault.”

God. He should have seen this coming, John’s been at breaking point for days, and now he doesn’t have the investigation or the rescue to focus on, all the anger and rage and guilt and frustration that he’s been feeling for years have got nowhere else to go. Because saving Stiles isn’t a magical cure. It doesn’t wipe the slate clean.

“It’s not your fault,” he repeats, and pulls John into a hug.

Laura slips out of the kitchen.

 

***

 

Peter is back just before dawn. Parrish hears Chris’s SUV pull up in the driveway, then the door opening and closing. Moments later the SUV pulls away again, and Peter steps through the front door. He stinks of gasoline.

He’s no longer wolfed out. He sinks down onto the couch and closes his eyes.

“How’d it go?” Laura asks intently.

“Kaboom,” Peter grins, and then opens his eyes again. He tilts his head to listen to something for a moment. “Good. They’re sleeping.”

Parrish leans in the doorway.

John sits down on the couch and gazes warily at Peter. “What’s the plan?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” Peter says. “Five years ago, Stiles and his friend stumbled across a drug deal gone wrong. The other boy was killed, but--”

“Scott,” John interjects.

“What?”

“His name was Scott,” John says firmly. “And he was a great kid.”

“Scott.” Peter’s expression softens. “Yes, of course. Scott was killed, but Gerard saw that Stiles was an omega, and kept him. Probably intended to traffic him at some point. We can sort out the details later. The important thing is, Stiles flees the compound with Ryan when the explosion occurs. And a day or two from now, when he’s had time to learn his story, someone will find him wandering in the woods, dazed and confused. Probably Laura.”

“But what if people saw us in town with Ryan the day we came to the coffee shop?” Parrish asks.

“That was your nephew,” Peter tells him. “We give Ryan a haircut. Nobody’s going to remember exactly what he looked like, unless you stopped and introduced him?”

Parrish thinks back. “No, we waited until it was almost closing, and came straight to the shop.”

“Good.” Peter nods. “Meanwhile, you find a way to backdate your emails and show you invited John to Beacon Hills for some insight into an old case. Not one that relates to us, or to Stiles.”

Parrish nods.

“And where does Derek fit into all of this?” Laura asks.

“He doesn’t,” Peter says. “He happens to come back from New York some time this week, and at some point he’ll start dating Stiles, and eventually they’ll be mated. A whirlwind romance.”

“Peter!”

“What?” Peter asks her. “You’d rather come up for an explanation as to why Gerard Argent was keeping him imprisoned? He’s not a valuable little omega. You want people to ask why we never reported him missing? Because there are only two reasons he would have been in that compound with Stiles. One, if he was a prisoner too, and if you can think of a plausible excuse for that, then be my guest. Two, he was one of Argent’s men. And I don’t think that’s going to play well with the authorities, is it?”

“You’re asking him to pretend he’s not Ryan’s father,” Laura says quietly.

“I’m asking him to lie about the past to ensure he has a future,” Peter replies. “I think that’s worth it, don’t you? Laura, Stiles’s reappearance is going to be big news.”

John nods.

“Now, more than ever, we cannot risk exposure. We need to keep Derek out of it.”

“He won’t like it,” Laura says.

“It’s been five years, Laura,” Peter tells her. “You think he’s still your stubborn, intractable little brother? Sweetheart, believe me, if Derek learned anything in that hellhole, it’s how to bend.”

A chill runs down Parrish’s spine.

 

***

 

Parrish ends up getting the last shower. The water’s cold, but he’s too tired to really care. He shoves his bloody clothes in a trash bag and takes it downstairs for Peter. Peter’s going to take them and burn them. The man has an uncannily good grasp on how to clean up a crime scene, and Parrish is sure it’s not just from watching CSI reruns.

“You need a hand?” he asks.

“No,” Peter tells him, adding Parrish’s bag to the stack. “You could use some plausible deniability, Sheriff.”

“It’s probably too late for that.”

“It’s never too late for plausible deniability.”

Parrish smiles almost unwillingly. “One thing I don’t get?”

“Just one thing?”

That definitely gets a smile. “From the start, you trusted Chris Argent. A hunter, from the family that killed your pack. Why is that?”

Peter’s blue eyes shine. “Ah.” He hefts the trash bags up. “Well, that’s complicated.”

“Facebook complicated?” Parrish hazards.

A smile tugs at the corners of Peter’s mouth. “Something like that. I figured that if Chris kept his word twenty years ago and never told his father how we fucked like bunnies for one entire summer, he’d keep his word now.”

Parrish raises his eyebrows.

“Still, it’s a shame.” Peter tugs his car keys out of his pocket.

“A shame?”

Peter’s smile grows. “A shame that Stiles killed him so quickly. I was quite looking forward to seeing the expression on his face when I told him his son used to suck werewolf dick.” He shrugs. “Still, you can’t win them all.”

He heads out the door with the trash bags, leaving Parrish fighting the sudden wild urge to laugh.


	24. Empty Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. Remember that time I had this weird dream I wrote down as a short drabble? 
> 
> How the hell is it now this long...and still going????

Stiles blinks himself awake when he hears plastic crinkling. He peers over the edge of the bed. Ryan is going through an open suitcase, tugging a pack of pull ups out. He’s nude. His pajamas and what Stiles assumes are the pull ups he was wearing underneath them last night are strewn over the floor.

Stiles watches as Ryan produces a yellow t-shirt and a pair of little jeans from the suitcase as well. Then, evidently having a change of heart, he puts the yellow t-shirt back and produces a blue one.

Ryan has clothes to choose from? Stiles feels tears welling. Of course he does. Because they’re not in the compound anymore, where Stiles washed Ryan’s scant, ugly clothes under the shower every day and hoped they’d dry before he needed them again.

He remembers begging Gerard for diapers. Remembers using old newspapers when there weren’t any. Remembers trying to toilet train Ryan, and trying not to cry when he had an accident because he didn’t have any dry clothes to put on his son.

He watches as Ryan steps into his pull ups and tugs them up. Then he tries to get into his jeans.

“Wrong way around, kiddo,” Stiles tells him.

Ryan turns around. “Daddy!”

“Come here,” Stiles says, and Ryan shuffles toward him with the jeans around his ankles. Stiles sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He corrals Ryan between his knees, and tugs the jeans off. He holds them the right way around so that Ryan can step into them, and then pulls them up, running a finger around the elastic waist to make sure it’s not pinching him.

“Shirt,” Ryan says, thrusting it into Stiles hands.

Stiles shakes the shirt out. There’s a carton dog on the front of it, holding a baseball bat. “Is Grandpa trying to make you into a baseball fan already?”

Ryan holds his arms up so Stiles can pull the shirt on. “Grandpa makes oatmeal. Yum.”

Stiles hauls Ryan up onto the bed and deposits him into the space between him and Derek. Derek’s awake too, a smile curving his mouth as Ryan lunges forward to kiss him.

“Still real?” Stiles asks him in a small voice.

“Still real,” Derek murmurs, and reaches out to lace his fingers through Stiles’s.

 

***

 

Ryan leads the way downstairs and heads straight for the kitchen.

Stiles and Derek follow cautiously.

Stiles trails his fingers along the walls.

It’s his house, but it’s not. It’s like everything is just a fraction out of step with Stiles’s memories, like he’s woken up in a world that’s almost the same except the people have button eyes or something. The dimensions of the house are unchanged, but the paint color is wrong, and the furniture is wrong, and there’s a part of Stiles that thinks being here is almost worse than being in a strange place.

Ryan is already climbing into a chair when Stiles and Derek reach the kitchen. Sheriff Parrish is pouring a juice for him, while Stiles’s dad makes oatmeal. Peter is sitting opposite Ryan, a cup of coffee steaming in front of him.

“Derek,” Peter says, standing and holding out his hand.

Derek seems to hesitate a moment before stepping forward into Peter’s embrace.

Stiles watches as Peter scents Derek, and then tilts his head so Derek can do the same to him.

“Look at you,” Peter says at last, cupping Derek’s face and shaking his head. “God. I missed you so much, pup.”

“I missed you too,” Derek says, his voice soft. “Where’s Laura?”

“She’s at the shop.” Peter presses his forehead to Derek’s for a moment. “She wanted to stay, but we have to keep up appearances today.”

“I want…” Derek swallows. “I want this to be real.”

Stiles shivers at the words, and his dad steps close to him and draws him into a hug.

Peter smiles sadly. “It is real, pup. You’re still in shock.” His gaze flicks to Stiles. “Both of you. But this is very real. Gerard is dead, and you’re _free_.”

Stiles shivers again at the weight of the word. He doesn’t understand his own fear. Not just fear that this isn’t real, but also fear that it _is_. He doesn’t know how to be free anymore. The world is too big, the future is, and he doesn’t know what to do.

“Oatmeal?” Ryan asks, squirming in his seat. “Grandpa, oatmeal?”

“Coming right up, kiddo,” Stiles’s dad says. “You going to show Daddy and Papa how to put honey on top?”

Ryan nods seriously, as though he’s been given a solemn duty. “Not whole bottle!”

“Not the whole bottle,” Stiles’s dad agrees, and Stiles thinks this is a conversation they’ve had before.

 

***

 

After breakfast, when Peter is taking Ryan to hunt for puddles in the back yard, and Sheriff Parrish has gone to work, and Stiles’s dad is doing the dishes, Stiles sneaks away upstairs and opens the door to his old bedroom. The formerly blue walls are white now. There’s a computer desk in one corner with no computer on it. There’s a box in another corner. There’s an air mattress on the ground, a folded pile of clothes on a chair, and a spare khaki uniform hanging from the hook behind the door. This must be where Sheriff Parrish is sleeping. Stiles would feel a little guilty about pushing the man out of his bed, except that the sheriff is the interloper here, right?

He sits down on the floor, and closes his eyes.

The last time he was in this room…

 

***

 

“Scotty! Scotty, guess what?” Stiles spins excitedly on his chair.

“What?” Scott sounds the way he always does whenever Stiles is about to rock his world: half intrigued, and half wary.

“So, my dad got called out, and I was listening to the scanner, and they’ve found half a body in the woods!”

“Ew. Gross.”

“You mean _awesome_.”

“I’m pretty sure I mean gross. Why are you even telling me this?”

Stiles grins into his phone. “Why else? Because we’re going to go and find the other half!”

 

***

 

The panic attack hits without warning. Stiles tries desperately to suck in a breath and hold it, and he knows he is, but it’s not doing anything, and his vision is gray at the edges. His heart is beating too fast, and he feels like it’s going to just explode, and wouldn’t that be what he _deserves_? He claws at his throat, at the tightness there, and he can’t _breathe_ , and he’s terrified he’s going to die.

He doesn’t really register the feet thumping up the steps, doesn’t really hear it above the sound of the blood pounding in his skull, but suddenly he’s being cradled against a warm body. A hand and rubbing up and down his back, and his face is pressed against Derek’s neck.

“Breathe,” Derek tells him. “I’ve got you.”

The raw desperate rasp of his breath subsides into quiet hitching sobs as Derek comforts him.

“Scott,” he whispers through his tears. “Scotty died.”

“I know.” Derek’s breath is warm against his ear. “I know.”

“My fault.”

“No.” The denial is quiet, soft. It’s not the first time Stiles has crumbled under the weight of his guilt, and it won’t be the last. They both know it doesn’t matter what Derek tells him. Stiles doesn’t believe it, but it’s nice that Derek does. Once, years ago, they tried to make a deal that Stiles wouldn’t feel guilty about Scott if Derek didn’t feel guilty about his family. But guilt doesn’t work like that. They both know it.

Stiles cries softly into Derek’s shirt. “He was my best friend.”

“I know,” Derek says again, rubbing his hand up and down Stiles’s spine, leaving trails of warmth behind. “I know.”

 

***

 

Over lunch, Peter fills them in on the plan, and for the first time Stiles sees that everything is even bigger and more complicated than he thought. There will be questions about what happened to him the night he went into the Preserve, about what happened to Scott. Questions about where he’s been, and what happened to him when he was there. Questions about _Ryan_.

Stiles isn’t sure he can deal with any of this.

“You want me to tell the police I was raped?” he asks dully.

Peter at least has the decency to look guilty. “Stiles, we have to keep Derek out of it. There’s no reason for him to have been there otherwise.”

“You want some official report to say that my son was the product of rape?” Stiles asks again. He curls his fingers into fists. “And not the product of the only fucking glimmer of hope I’ve had in the past five years? That’s not fair!”

He looks to his dad for support, and John reaches out and squeezes his hand.

He looks to Derek instead.

Derek looks as beaten down as any time in the basement. “Stiles…”

“Don’t tell me you want this?”

“I don’t.” Derek swallows. “But it’s necessary. Stiles, you did what you had to do to survive. This is just another thing, okay?”

“Okay,” Stiles says at last, because he can see that the idea hurts Derek just as much as it hurts him, and it’s not fair to make Derek argue about it. “Can this… can this be the last thing?”

Derek looks to Peter.

“Yes,” Peter says, his expression filled with sadness. “Yes, this is the last thing.”


	25. Empty Homecoming

At ten a.m. on Wednesday morning, Parrish is in the middle of a budget meeting with the mayor when his phone rings.

“Excuse me,” he tells the mayor. One of the perks of his job. Not even the mayor can object if the sheriff needs to take a call. “Parrish.”

“Sheriff.” It’s Marcie. She sounds breathless. “Sheriff, dispatch just took a 911 from a woman walking in the woods. She says she’s found Stiles Stilinski! _Alive_!”

“What?” Parrish is aware of the mayor’s curious gaze on him. “You’re gonna need to repeat that for me, Marcie.”

She does, even more breathless than before.

“I’m on my way,” Parrish tells her, ending the call. He apologizes to the mayor and heads outside.

 

***

 

It’s not much of a scene, not yet. Word isn’t out yet. But it will be soon, no matter how much Parrish has tried to keep it off the radio. There’s an ambulance pulled into the parking lot on the eastern side of the Preserve when he gets there, and also a few civilian cars. People are out taking advantage of the first break in the rain in over a week, even though the paths through the woods must be mostly mud.

Parrish finds that out for himself.

Cortez, one of his deputies, is already on scene when Parrish gets to them. He only has a few years of service behind him. He knows John Stilinski, Parrish figures, but probably hasn’t met Stiles before. He’s wide-eyed and worried as the paramedics wrap Stiles and Ryan in an orange shock blanket.

Laura is standing a little off to one side, wearing jogging gear.

Parrish trudges through the mud to reach Stiles. Stiles is wearing torn track pants and a thin hoodie. No shoes. Ryan is dressed in an old t-shirt. His newly-shorn hair makes his face look thin. He and Stiles look as wretched as the first night Parrish saw them, which he supposes is the point.

Ryan watches as he approaches, and Stiles bends and whispers something in his ear. Ryan puts his arms around Stiles’s neck and hides his face.

“My name is Sheriff Jordan Parrish,” Parrish says. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Stiles,” Stiles tells him. “Stiles Stilinski.”

“How did you get here, Stiles?” Parrish asks.

“I don’t—” Stiles swallows. “I don’t know. There was an explosion, and I ran away.”

“There was an explosion down in Beacon Valley a few days ago,” Cortez volunteers.

Helpful.

“Okay,” Parrish says. “Okay, let’s get you to the hospital, and try and figure some stuff out.”

Stiles lets the paramedics help him down the muddy track toward the ambulance.

 

***

 

Within three hours there are two FBI agents at the hospital. Straight from the Sacramento field office. By then Parrish has got Stiles and Ryan settled in a private room at the hospital, John by their side. Ryan is fussy but quiet, flinching back from the doctors and nurses who want to check him and Stiles.

Stiles whispers to him a few times, and each time he seems to curl up into himself. Parrish catches it once: “Quiet as a mouse.”

The last thing they need is Ryan asking for his grandpa when John’s supposed to be a stranger.

The agents introduce themselves. Parrish is only glad Scott McCall’s father isn’t one of them. God only knows that’s the last thing Stiles needs now. He looks fragile enough as it is.

“There are some questions the agents need to ask you, Stiles,” Parrish says. “Are you okay to talk?”

Stiles nods warily. This isn’t easy for him.

“Stiles,” one of the agents says. He’s wearing what he might think is a comforting smile. It sits so awkwardly on his square face that Parrish wants to cringe away from it too. “Who’s this little guy?”

Stiles tightens his grip on Ryan. “Ryan. My son.”

“Who’s his other father?” the agent asks.

Stiles’s eyes widen. “That’s not—” He swallows and starts again. “That’s not something I want to talk about in front of Ryan.”

“Stiles, we—”

“No,” Stiles says firmly. “Not in front of my son.”

The agents glance at one another, as though they’re surprised to see such determination in a victim of trauma. No, Parrish realizes after a moment, in an _omega_. Omegas are supposed to respond to authority with deference. Omegas are supposed to submit.

The agent opens his mouth to say something else, and John leans forward in his chair and curls his hand around the rails of Stiles’s bed.

“I think Stiles has already explained to you that he won’t be answering that question in front of his child,” he says. “And if you’re not prepared to respect that, then I’m shutting this down right now.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Stilinski,” the second agent says, “you can’t—”

The door opens and Peter steps inside, cell phone in one hand, coffee in the other, and a messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

“Peter Hale,” he says, without waiting for the agents to ask. “I’m young Mr. Stilinski’s attorney. I’m sorry, I should clarify that. I’m _both_ young Mr. Stilinskis’ attorney, and neither of them will be answering any more questions today.”

Parrish keeps his face impassive.

Because of course he is. Of course he fucking is.

 

***

 

It takes a few hours to get Stiles’s medical results back. He’s anaemic, slightly malnourished, but in otherwise reasonable health. The way the doctor says _reasonable_ , looking at Stiles like he’s afraid he’ll collapse at any moment, Parrish isn’t sure the word means what it’s supposed to. Ryan though, appears in excellent health, although Stiles refused to consent to blood tests for his son.

“You need someone to make sure you’re eating right, Stiles,” Peter tells him, and the doctor nods emphatically. “And making sure you’re capable of caring for your child.”

Stiles narrows his eyes at that, and it’s the closest Parrish has seen him come to something that looks like anger. He opens his mouth for what’s sure to be a blistering rebuttal.

“My nephew’s worked in home care before,” Peter says smoothly, and Stiles clamps his mouth shut again. “I’ll give you his number.”

Parrish has to excuse himself from the room before he can no longer hold back his disbelief at Peter’s sheer audacity.

 

***

 

It’s late by the time Parrish gets home. Past ten. He grabs a beer out of the fridge, and sits on the back porch to drink it. The back door opens after a while, and Laura sits down on the step beside him.

“Everyone okay?” Parrish asks.

“I think so.” Laura twists the top of her own beer. “Everyone’s asleep.”

“You know, I was driving here past Home Depot, and you know what I thought?” Parrish huffs. “I thought I should get a couple more mattresses, so John doesn’t have to sleep on the couch, and you and Peter can stay over. Maybe convert the garage into an apartment so that everyone’s got some space. Build a cubbyhouse for Ryan.”

Laura smiles slightly and stares out into the dark blur of trees just beyond the back fence.

“But this is all just temporary, isn’t it?” Parrish asks.

Laura’s smile fades. “Yes, Jordan. It’s just temporary.”

He takes a swig of his beer to drown the sudden pang in his gut. “Okay.”

She flinches a little, as though she’s been struck. “ _Okay_?”

“I thought that…” Parrish clears his throat, and the beer tastes suddenly bitter. He’s not sure how to interpret her body language, or what that flinch means. Is she uncomfortable because she’s suddenly realized Parrish has built up all this dumb hope and now he’s leaving it to her to tear down? “It doesn’t matter.”

“You thought what, Jordan?”

He fixes his gaze on his beer bottle, and picks at the damp label with his thumb. “I thought there was something between us.”

Laura shifts, and for a moment Parrish thinks she’s moving away. The he feels the warmth of her body as she leans into his space. “I _can’t_ , Jordan.”

He nods. “Powerful alpha wolf like you.”

“No.” Laura presses her face against his throat and inhales deeply. “I don’t deserve a man like you, Jordan. Not when you’ve already done so much for us.”

Before he can ask what she means, Laura’s risen to her feet and vanished inside again.

Parrish sits in the dark and finishes his beer and catches glimpses of moonlight in the breaks between the clouds.

 


	26. Empty Beginnings

Waking up with Derek beside him feels new. It _is_ new—at the compound Stiles was only ever permitted to stay the night if he was in heat, and those mornings weren’t waking up so much as clawing his way out of a fever dream to find Derek’s arms still around him—but this feels new because _they_ feel new. Stiles was only ever a prisoner, frightened and alone, seeking solace and comfort from Derek, and providing in turn what little he could. Now though, the future unwinds in front of them, terrifying in the sheer breadth of all its possibilities, and Stiles wakes up with Derek because that’s what he _chooses_. It’s what the both choose.

He’s not hiding from anything in Derek’s embrace anymore. He’s there because he wants to be.

Stiles knows his dad doesn’t get it. John’s gaze falls regularly to the scar of Stiles’s mating bite, seeking it out even when it’s hidden under a shirt and a hoodie, like he thinks it’s some kind of supernatural leash. And maybe it is? Stiles doesn’t know, exactly. But he knows it’s the kind of leash with a handle on both ends.

He waits one morning until Derek and Ryan are in the back yard, and Laura and Parrish are at work, and Peter is out doing whatever it is that Peter does. Then he sets a cup of coffee down in front of his dad at the kitchen table, slides into the seat opposite him, and says, “Dad, we need to talk.”

John nods, but he looks wary, like he has no idea where this is going to go.

“You need to know that Derek never hurt me.” His flingers brush against the very faint scars on his throat. “This? This was to force them to keep me away from him. It gave me the chance to run.”

“Kid, it’s not those scars that bother me,” John says quietly.

“I know.” Stiles rubs his mating bite scar under his shirt. “They were going to kill me if he didn’t bite me. I mean, that’s what they said.” He can still feel the cold rush of horror at looking down and seeing that tiny red point of light fixed over his heart. “And I guess if all they wanted me for was to mate with a werewolf, then if he’d refused, they would have done it.”

John draws in a shaking breath.

“Gerard underestimated wolves, you know.” Stiles smiles slightly. “Or maybe he just underestimated Derek. He thought if he just locked that basement door, then nature would take its course. And…and we made it look like it did. But Dad, Derek never even touched me that way when I was in heat.”

He flushes now, a faint echo of that heat in the warmth flooding his face, when he thinks about all the times he’d begged Derek to fuck him, and Derek had held his wrists so he couldn’t struggle and then steadfastly refused. Every damn time. How he’d let Stiles rub himself off against him when it got really bad, but never mated him, not even when the scent rolling off an in-heat omega must have driven him almost mad with the primal urge to fuck and claim.

“I wasn’t in heat when I got pregnant,” Stiles says. “I found a condom in a medical kit. Fucking thing broke, didn’t it?” He shivers, remembering crying and begging Derek to punch him in the stomach. The thought of it makes him feel sick now, but he knows that in the same circumstances he’d make the same plea. Half afraid he wouldn’t do it, and half afraid he would. “I know I was only seventeen, but it was me that went to him, okay? And you saw that place, Dad. You saw it. I needed…” He scrubs at his sudden tears. “I needed to be with someone I loved.”

John is already out of his chair, coming around the table and going to his knees beside Stiles’s chair. Stiles shifts around and leans forward into his embrace, holding onto him tight.

“Okay,” John says after a while, patting his back. “Thank you for telling me that. I needed to hear it.”

Stiles sniffles, and closes his eyes. “Because I know on paper we’re a terrible fit, but you remember how you always told me I talked too much?”

John’s arms tighten around him. “Yeah.”

“Derek is a _great_ listener!”

John shakes with what Stiles hopes is silent laughter. “I don’t think I’ve heard him say two words, you know?”

“See? We’re pretty perfect.” Stiles draws in a deep breath. “And he does talk, except there are kind of a lot of people in this house. It’s been pretty overwhelming to go from that, to this.”

“You take all the time you need,” John tells him, his voice rough. “Both of you.”

 

***

 

Stiles makes the mistake of turning on the television after breakfast, and seeing his own name scroll past in the banner underneath the cheery morning host’s smile. He fumbles with the remote control for what feels like an eternity before he manages to turn it off again.

He’s not ready for the outside world yet.

 

***

 

Derek is a terrible nutritionist and home nurse.

“What are you doing?” he asks, walking into the kitchen to find Stiles and Ryan digging into a tub of chocolate ice cream.

“Snacking.” Stiles holds out the spoon for him, and Derek takes a mouthful of the ice cream.

Watching his wary expression morph into one of surprised pleasure is something Stiles wants to see over and over again.

They end up sitting on the living room floor, watching some kids’ DVD with Ryan, and getting ice cream all over themselves.

“We should ask for more ice cream,” Derek says.

Stiles nods and grins.

 

***

 

“I used to think if I got out, I’d just run,” Derek says.

The rain is pattering down again, and they’re in the back yard with Ryan. Ryan is fascinated by the way the rain drags down the leaves on the shrubs. He shakes the branches to make the droplets spring forth.

“Run where?” Stiles asks.

“Just run,” Derek says. “Nowhere special. Just be free to move, you know?”

Stiles curls his fingers through Derek’s.

“And now we’re out…” Derek glances at the back fence, into the Preserve.

“I know,” Stiles says. “I used to tell myself the first thing I’d do would be get back in my Jeep and drive to the diner and order everything off the menu. But the thought of leaving the house?” He shudders.

“Did you ever see those nature documentaries where they take injured animals, and fix them? And then when it’s time to release them into the wild again, they’re too scared to leave the cage?”

“Papa!” Ryan rushes toward them, holding a leaf. “Look!”

Derek crouches down and takes the leaf. “This is a nice one. Good job!”

Ryan beams at him, and presses his fingers closed around the leaf. “For you!”

“Thank you,” Derek tells him. “Can you find one for Daddy too?”

Ryan scurries away again.

“This isn’t our cage though.” Stiles pulls Derek to his feet. “We already got out of our cage.”

“I’m scared,” Derek says. “Stiles, I’m still so scared.”

“Me too,” Stiles whispers, and leans into Derek’s hug. They stand there a long time, the gentle rain dampening them, until Ryan comes hurrying back with the leaf he found for Stiles.

 

***

 

Stiles asks for a pinboard, and Laura brings one back that afternoon when she’s finished at the coffee shop. Stiles sits it on the dresser in the room he shares with Derek, and pins the leaves to it. The next day Ryan finds the frond of a fern poking through the fence, and they add that to the board.

Maybe Derek’s not ready to run in the Preserve yet, and maybe Stiles isn’t ready to go into town. Maybe they can’t go out into the world just now, but they can bring tiny pieces of the world to them until they are ready.


	27. Empty Ghosts

“Peter Hale to see you, Sheriff,” Marcie says, sticking her head around the doorframe.

“Show him through.”

Peter’s been a regular visitor to the station in the past week. Mostly to annoy the FBI agents, who’ve taken over a spare office while they investigate Stiles’s reappearance. Parrish isn’t ashamed to admit that, yes, he’s checked Peter Hale really is an attorney. Before the Hale house fire he was apparently some young hotshot with an L.A. firm. After the fire, and the coma, he didn’t practice again, although he’s still a member of the State Bar. Parrish thinks he’s getting a real kick out of dangling Stiles in front of the agents like he’s a piece of juicy bait on a line, and watching them snap at him eagerly before reeling him away again. But he’s also aware that Peter really does seem to have Stiles’s welfare at heart. The second Stiles starts to get stressed in an interview, Peter shuts it down.

Peter steps into the office, and closes the door behind him. “What are your thoughts on Beacon Valley’s finest?”

Parrish lowers his voice as Peter takes a seat. “The officer that Stiles saw?”

“I’ve been nosing around down in the valley,” Peter says, gaze sharpening. “I picked up a trail.”

“What does that mean though?” Parrish asks. “How sure can you be?”

"Wolves know scent, Sheriff. And that man still smells like the hunters from the compound.” Peter smirks slightly. “He also has some interesting payments into his bank account. Regular as clockwork. Funnily enough, the one due three days ago isn’t there.”

As uncomfortable as Parrish is talking about this at the station, while wearing his uniform, he can’t brush it off for later. “Peter, at some point it needs to stop.”

Peter’s gaze drops to his badge and then lifts again. “Because you’re brothers in blue? Or khaki, as it were?”

“No.” Parrish frowns. “Because I can’t countenance _murder_. I sure as hell know my hands aren’t clean, but those hunters were pointing guns at us. That’s the difference.”

Peter tilts his head. “Well then. Isn’t it lucky none of them decided to come quietly that night?”

Parrish returns his stare evenly. “Yeah, it is.”

Of course he’s thought about it. Thought about what the hell he would have done if one of those hunters had surrendered instead. It’s not like Parrish could have _arrested_ him. Parrish isn’t comfortable whenever he has to stare into the widening gulf between what’s moral and what’s necessary. Then again, none of real ethical questions are ever designed to be comfortable, are they? But he’s got to draw the line somewhere.

Somewhere before premeditated murder.

“Find another way to ruin him,” Parrish says. “Linking those payments to a meth lab would be a hell of a good start. And, Peter, don’t ever make the assumption that I will defend a cop just because he’s a cop. Ever.”

Peter regards him silently for a moment, and then smiles. “I like you, Jordan.”

Parrish raises his eyebrows. “That scares me a hell of a lot.”

Peter’s smile grows into something genuine.

Parrish draws a deep breath. “You waiting for Stiles?”

Peter checks his watch. “Yes. John should be dropping him off shortly. I’ll give the agents once last chance to try and prove they didn’t come last in their graduating classes at Quantico, and then I think we’re done. Stiles can’t tell them anything, and they know it.”

It’s true. Stiles can barely map out the interior of the compound after five years inside it. He was restricted to three or four rooms, and the basement. He was genuinely surprised when the agents showed him a map of the place, with outbuildings clustered around.

“Good,” Parrish says. “The sooner the FBI is done, the sooner they can fuck off back to Sacramento.”

“Spoken like a true small town sheriff,” Peter says approvingly.

 

***

 

Parrish spends the afternoon listening to Marcie brush off phone calls from the media. It makes him itch, or something. It gnaws at the low burning anger in his gut. He doesn’t like how there’s an expectation that Stiles owes the public an explanation, that he’ll be willing to sell his story. He doesn’t like it when he hears one of the newer deputies say that at least Stiles will get money out of his story, right? As though it’s some kind of consolation. Or worse, all his dignity is worth.

He takes a phone call from the mayor, reminding him on how good this will look for him when it comes to his election campaign, and it’s all Parrish can do not to end the call then and there.

“Marcie,” he says instead. “I’m heading out for a patrol.”

He grabs his hat, grabs his keys, and heads for the parking lot.

 

***

 

He ends up parked up on the edge of the Preserve, seat pushed back, boots on the dashboard, blasting whatever shit songs the local radio station is playing. The mayor would definitely not approve—this is not a good look for the upcoming election.

He doesn’t want to go home yet.

The house that felt too big when he bought it now feels crowded, and Parrish isn’t really a part of that crowd. He was never supposed to be a part of this. He still remembers the look on Stiles’s face the night of the storm. John was supposed to open that door to Stiles, not Parrish.

What’s Parrish been doing but working another man’s job, living in another man’s house, and stepping uninvited into another man’s story?

There’s no future in that.

 

***

 

It’s dark when he makes it home. The smell of steaks cooking on the grill draws him out onto the back porch.

“Right there!” John’s saying, pointing the tongs at a corner of the yard. “The swing set was right there, until the day you thought that you could use it to launch yourself over the fence. I got a frantic call from your mom that I’d better have it taken down by the time she got you back from the hospital.”

“Four stitches,” Stiles grins.

John slings an arm around him. “You kept us on our toes, son.”

Peter’s sitting on the cooler, his sleeves rolled up and his tie undone. He gets up long enough to pass Parrish a beer. “I’m sure Ryan will do the same.”

Ryan, sitting on Derek’s hip, smiles when he hears his name and then sticks his fingers in his mouth.

Derek takes him down into the back yard, and Stiles follows after them.

It’s impossible for Parrish to feel regret when he looks at them. The darkness softens their edges, and when Stiles closes the space between them their figures seem to almost merge together. It’s not regret he feels, but there’s a creeping sort of _something_ washing over him. It has a strange, sweet edge to it.

Peter stands up and goes to help John at the grill. They talk in low voices, leaving Parrish to glance at Laura, and force a smile it’s difficult to feel. It’s uncomfortable enough that he can’t stand it for more than a few minutes, and uses the excuse of getting changed out of his uniform to head inside again.

He climbs the stairs to the spare bedroom, and wonders if he needs a shower or not. He decides it can wait, and unbuttons his uniform shirt. He shrugs it off.

He doesn’t realize he’s left the door ajar until it’s opening with a squeak.

“Jordan?” Laura steps inside. “I’m sorry.”

Parrish shrugs. “You don’t need to apologize for anything.”

“I do,” she says. “What I said the other night… You’re a good man, and you deserve to know the truth.”

“The truth?”

“It was me,” Laura says. Her eyes flash alpha red at the same time as they fill with tears. “I killed Kate Argent. What happened to Derek, to Stiles and Scott… that’s my fault.”

“I…” He thinks back to what he told Peter at the station earlier. That he can’t countenance murder. He thinks back to what he told himself as well. That there has to be a line. And then he remembers sorting through the files on the Hale house fire, and seeing the photographs of Laura’s family. Before and after. He steps forward and takes Laura’s hand. “It’s not your fault. And I would have done the same thing.”

 


	28. Empty Victory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And because of real life getting in the way I might not be posting as quickly in the next day or so - but I will still try and post at least once every 24 hours. Depends on if I get the next chapter written tonight at work or not!

Peter makes a hell of a burger. Okay, so John did the actual cooking, but it’s Peter who loads the burger up with baby spinach leaves and red onion and aioli and a whole bunch of other stuff that somehow totally works. Stiles sits on the back steps and balances his paper plate on his knees. Derek sits beside him, and he and Ryan pick from the same plate.

“Are you going to steal all Papa’s food?” Stiles asks him.

“Grandpa makes yum food,” Ryan tells him seriously.

“Hey!” Peter calls from over by the grill. “Uncle Peter helped!”

Ryan peeks over Derek’s shoulder and smiles shyly at Peter.

Stiles used to cook for his dad, after his mom died. Not because he was an omega—he hadn’t presented yet—but because they were a _team_. His dad did the laundry and the housework, and Stiles did the cooking. He got better at cooking as he got older. Better than his dad. And now Ryan thinks John is a master chef or something, because all Stiles has ever given him is crackers and bread, and food from cans that sometimes wasn’t even heated up first.

He just…

It doesn’t seem fair that Ryan doesn’t know his daddy can cook too. That it’s something totally out of his comprehension. Daddy gives cuddles, but what else does he give? Damp clothes, stale crackers, and silence.

Stiles shivers as Derek curls his hand around the back of his neck and rubs his thumb gently against the edge of the scar from his bite. He doesn’t even realize his heartbeat had picked up and panic was starting to flare inside him until Derek’s touch has soothed it away again.

Stiles sets his half-eaten burger aside.

He’s not hungry anymore.

 

***

 

“I don’t want to hide here anymore, Der,” Stiles says later that night, holding Ryan up so that Derek can pull his pajama pants on him. “I don’t want my dad to be the one who gets everything, you know?” He winces. “That sounds horrible. I mean I want us to be the ones to take Ryan to a playground, or to a toy store, or to the library. I want to make good memories with him.”

Derek blows a raspberry on Ryan’s tummy, and lets him drop giggling to the bed. “We can do that.”

Stiles raises his eyebrows. “Apart from the fact I don’t ever want to leave the house?”

“We’ll see if your dad remembers where he dumped your swing set,” Derek suggests. “Set up our own playground and see if Ryan can clear the fence.”

Stiles laughs. “You’d bounce, hey, baby boy?”

“Bounce,” Ryan agrees.

Stiles sits on the bed and holds his arms out and Ryan scrambles toward him for a hug. “I used to do all the cooking. After my mom died, I mean. I liked looking after Dad, making sure he was eating right.” His throat aches. “I was good at it.”

Derek sits down beside him. “I heard what you said earlier, to your dad.”

“About…” Stiles clears his throat. “About us?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you regret biting me?” Stiles had never been brave enough to ask that in the basement. Or maybe he’d known what Derek’s answer would have been back there. It’s different now though.

“I regret the circumstances,” Derek says, a slight frown on his forehead as his brows draw together. Stiles thinks he’s choosing his words very carefully. “We were prisoners, and you were a kid. But I don’t regret you.”

Stiles cuddles Ryan and presses a kiss to the top of his head. “Do you think you would have noticed me in the real world?”

Derek’s eyes crinkle when he smiles. “I would have _heard_ you.”

Stiles leans toward him, and Derek brushes his mouth against his in a gentle kiss. It makes Stiles shiver, and wonder if a heat is coming. His heats are supposed to be regular, but a combination of his bad diet and stress have pretty much fucked that up. He has no idea when the next one will come. The hospital gave Stiles heat suppressants. He felt sick when he took the first one, so he didn’t take the others. He takes his contraceptive pill though.

“You okay?” Derek asks quietly.

“I’ve like, never had this conversation with anyone before,” Stiles tells Derek. “It’s weird. It’s like I’m in control of it all now, not those assholes, but also, I should be asking you?”

“Asking me about what?” Derek asks.

Stiles flushes. “I’m not taking my suppressants.”

“You don’t need to ask me,” Derek says. “It’s your body.”

“But you kind of have a stake in it too?” Stiles feels like an awkward teenager all over again. “Do you want us to have sex?”

“Yes.” Derek pats Ryan’s back gently. “Maybe when we’re not sharing with our son?”

“Yeah.” Stiles’s face burns. “This is, um, theoretical, right? I’m not going to jump you right now or anything.”

Derek’s smile is shy and beautiful.

“But maybe when my next heat hits, we can actually, um, go with it?”

Derek’s eyes flare. “Yes. Please.”

Stiles chews his lower lip for a moment. “And maybe, one day, I can stop taking the contraceptive as well?” Derek is silent for a long moment, and Stiles feels panic bubbling up inside him. “I mean, not if you don’t want me to! I wouldn’t, without telling you, and I know that Ryan was a mistake and—”

“An accident,” Derek corrects. “Not a mistake, Stiles, an accident.”

Stiles sags in relief. “So one day you think you’ll want another one? With _me_?”

“Of course I do,” Derek tells him. “And of course with you.”

The future is still frighteningly unknowable, but Stiles thinks that he likes the idea that somewhere it holds another baby, waiting for them until they’re ready.

 

***

 

Stiles wakes up in the middle of the night to find Derek gone. He leaves Ryan tucked in and heads downstairs. All the lights are off except in the kitchen. Stiles shuffles that way, and leans in the doorway when he sees Derek and Laura sitting at the table. They both looked red-eyed and wrecked.

“I knew,” Derek is saying. “I knew it wasn’t Peter, knew it wasn’t me, so…”

Laura scrubs at her cheeks with the heels of her hands. “You told me I shouldn’t go after her.”

“You’re the alpha,” Derek says. “It was your choice.”

“It was the wrong choice!”

Derek is silent.

“I’m so sorry, Der.”

Stiles tries not to think of every time he lay awake at night, listening to Derek’s pained howls and the laughter of the hunters. Watching the lights flicker as down in the basement they tortured Derek with electricity. He never saw it himself, but he saw Derek afterward. Hurt, broken, angry and defeated. He saw Gerard afterward too, the old man’s eyes glowing with sick satisfaction.

“Kate would have come after us,” Derek says at last. “She would have, because she was as crazy as her father. Maybe we would have survived that. Maybe we wouldn’t. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life playing what-ifs. I did that for the last five years. I just want it to be over.”

“Me too,” Laura says, swallowing. “Me too.”

Derek meets Stiles’s gaze, and the corners of his mouth lift in a smile so brief that Stiles wonders if he imagined it. He thinks that all of them are going to spend a lifetime tripping over their guilt. Derek, for what Kate did. Laura, for killing Kate and setting Gerard off. John, for not finding Stiles and for leaving. Stiles, for Scott, and for Ryan too. For all the things he couldn’t give him up until now. And even Peter, whose smug, clever manipulation of the situation can only be compensation for the fact it took so long to find them.

“We’re all a bit fucked up,” Stiles says softly.

Laura’s laugh sounds close to tears.

“But we’re alive,” Stiles says, “and they’re dead. So I think that means we’re winning.”

And Stiles thinks that whatever else happens, however hard it is to navigate the future, that he likes the idea winning enough to keep doing it.

 

 

 

 

 


	29. Less Empty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jesus Christ. These chapter titles. Can we all just pretend they're not a thing I foolishly started?

Laura Hale kisses Parrish like she’s asking a question. Hell if Parrish knows what that question is, but his answer is yes.

 

***

 

Parrish isn’t certain what Laura and Derek talked about last night before Laura headed home, but it’s not hard to take a guess. She’d confessed to Parrish after all, and then they’d sat in his room talking for what felt like hours. The more she’d talked, the easier the words had seemed to come. This morning, Parrish wonders how long it’s been since Laura spoke to anyone about her family without having to censor herself.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, she’d kissed him and then leaned back again, taking his breath with her, leaving him wide-eyed. Leaving him with his heart thumping, his lungs empty, on the edge of a precipice. He didn’t know if he was going to fall or fly.

Then, just when Parrish had been working up the courage to ask her to stay the night, she’d heard Derek heading for the bathroom, and intercepted him on his way back. They'd gone into the kitchen to talk. Parrish had laid awake for a while, but Laura hadn’t come back.

He’d closed his eyes for a few moments, and suddenly it was morning.

Derek seems better today. Just as quiet, but not as wary. It’s like he’s finally settling in. He even stretches when he’s sitting at the kitchen table with Stiles, rolling his shoulders and closing his eyes as he does. When Parrish is right there and so is John. When Parrish doubts that Derek has even dared _blink_ in the company of humans for the last five years, not willing to take his eyes off them for even a fraction of a second.

Ryan is sitting on Stiles’s lap, picking at a small plate of apple slices. He’s alternating nibbling at them himself, or trying to share them with his daddy by jamming them into Stiles’s mouth whenever he opens his mouth to talk.

“Don’t bother, Ryan,” John grumbles as he heads for the coffee maker. “It’ll take more than that to shut him up.”

“I resent that,” Stiles says.

John backtracks, leans down to kiss the top of his head, then moves toward the counter again. “No, you don’t.”

“I don’t,” Stiles confirms, smiling down at Ryan.

Ryan beams back at him.

Parrish eats his breakfast leaning against the counter. The kitchen really isn’t big enough for…a pack? He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to claim that word. He can’t help but think of the stories Laura told him last night. Stories of her parents and her siblings, of her aunts and uncles and cousins. Of the people whose faces Parrish knows from the files still in the living room. Parrish has never known a loss like that. He’s never even had the amount of people in his life to imagine a loss anything close to as devastating as that. He doesn’t know how the hell Laura found the strength to get out of bed the morning after the fire, and the morning after that, and every one that’s come since.

“You heading into the station?” John asks, taking in Parrish’s uniform.

“Yeah. Figured I’d help the FBI pack up their office and get the hell out of town.”

“Are they done with me?” Stiles asks. There’s a thready note of hope in his voice.

“I think so,” Parrish tells him.

“Good.” Stiles swallows. “Now we just have to get the media off my ass.”

John grunts. “You might find they’re even more persistent than the FBI.”

Stiles huffs, and leans his head back so Ryan can’t shove any more apple in it just yet. “Please. Give it a few days. I’m sure someone else with a heart wrenching story will turn up soon.”

“Oh, but Stiles will want to talk to us,” Derek mimics with a grimace. “We’re _Fox News_!”

“I think they think I’m holding out for more money,” Stiles says. “Personally I think there’s enough bullshit on their channel without adding my bullshit to it. I told Peter to tell them to fuck off.” He belatedly slips his hands over Ryan’s ears. “Whoops.”

Parrish wonders if the money would make a difference. Dumb question. Money always makes a difference. He’s glad that Stiles wants nothing to do with the media, and hopes it’s not something he’ll regret later. He hopes it’s not. Nobody should have to choose between money and privacy.

John follows him to the front door when he leaves for work.

“You need me to pick up any groceries today?” Parrish asks.

“I’ll take care of it,” John says.

Parrish hesitates. “They look good together. Better.”

John rubs his forehead. “Yeah, I think so. Think they’re getting there.”

_You all are._

Parrish glances around the entryway, at the corners and cornices he painted only a few months ago. “I’d sell it back to you, you know. At cost.”

John’s eyes widen. “The house?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Jordan.”

“You didn’t. But I’m offering.”

John’s smile is rueful. “I’m not sure I could afford it, what with the money I’ve put down on the new place. I don’t know if I could turn a profit on that. It was never part of the consideration when I bought the place. Figured it’d just be somewhere to keep the rain off until I got old and died. I don’t even have a job anymore.”

“Pretty sure the town would vote you back in.”

John smiles faintly and puts a hand on Jordan’s shoulder. “Thank you, but I’m not ready to be the sheriff again. And I appreciate your offer on the house, but maybe we can postpone this discussion for a while? Until I figure out what Stiles needs?”

“Sure.” Parrish digs his keys out of his pocket. “I just wanted you to know the offer’s there.”

If he’s honest with himself, the house has never really felt like a home to him.

The people in it do though.

 

***

 

The bells above the door of the coffee shop jingle as Parrish pushes the door open. It’s early. Early enough that he ignored the closed sign. He’d seen Laura unlock the door a few minutes earlier and collect the newspapers left on the stoop, and he’d been betting on the fact she hadn’t locked it after her.

“Sherriff,” she says with a teasing smile. “You’re here early.”

“Ms. Hale,” he says, and tips the brim of his hat. He approaches the counter. “I’m here to investigate a crime that occurred last night.”

“Oh.” She folds her arms over her chest and arches her brows. “And what crime is that?”

“A hit and run,” Parrish says.

Her eyes narrow slightly, like she’s trying to figure him out. “You’re here to investigate a hit and run?”

“Well, just the run part,” Parrish tells her, trying to pretend he knows how this flirting shit works. “You’re welcome to hit this whenever you like.”

For a moment he thinks he’s totally ruined it, but then Laura throws her head back and laughs. Parrish doesn’t think he’s heard her laugh before. It’s loud. Brighter than the bells.

Laura leans over the counter, grabs him by the collar, and reels him in.

***

 

“Sheriff, did you hear what happened in Beacon Valley?” Marcie asks.

“What happened?”

“Rob Knowles—he’s been there for _years_ —is being investigated by the DEA! He’s resigned already, so you know what that means!”

Parrish does. It means Knowles hasn’t got a corrupt leg to stand on, and he knows it. Peter works very, very fast.

“They say he was taking money off Gerard Argent! I mean, bad enough he was looking the other way about the drugs, but what if he knew about Stiles too?” Marcie’s usually sympathetic face hardens. “I hope his cellmate shivs him in the guts!”

Parrish wonders if that’s something Peter can arrange too. He finds he really doesn’t want to know the answer. It’s a lot easier to look the other way.

That’s probably what Rob Knowles thought too.

 

***

 

Air mattresses are the worst.

Air mattresses and claws are the worst.

There’s a pop, a hiss of air escaping, and suddenly he and Laura are lying naked on the withered remains of the mattress. Laura leans forward. Her hair curtains his face as she whispers against his lips, “Sheriff Parrish, you need to get a new bed. Immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he tells her.

She laughs.

 


	30. Less Haunted

There are things in the world that Stiles is afraid to see. Things that belong to the past, to his life before captivity, and Stiles is frightened of the power they have over him. It takes him three days to work up the courage to even ask his dad about visiting his mom’s grave, and then he backs out again at the last minute. John finds him sitting on his bed, his shoes in his hand, frozen. A stuttering apology falls from his mouth.

The mattress dips as his dad sits down beside him. “Stiles, you don’t need to push yourself to do anything you’re not ready for.”

“What if I do though? How am I supposed to know if I’m ready or not?”

“Your mom’s grave will still be there tomorrow, or next week, or a year from now.” John’s smile is sad. “And you don’t need to go there to remember her.”

Stiles nods, chewing his lip. “I used to… whenever I got stressed about something, I used to go and talk to her, remember?”

“I remember.” John puts an arm around him. “Son, you can talk to her from here.”

“I used to…” Stiles swallows. “I used to talk to her a lot, back there. I want to show her that I’m out, that I’m okay. It’s dumb, I know, but I want to walk up to her to prove it or something.”

“It’s not dumb,” John tells him. “It’s also not a race. Your mom will be waiting when you’re ready.”

“Maybe we can try again another time?”

“Sure, kid.” John squeezes him tight. “Another time.”

 

***

 

Stiles is going to be sick. He already _has_ been sick, twice, and now he can feel his stomach roiling again even though there’s nothing left in it. Here’s another thing he’s not ready for, but is already overdue. He sits in the living room staring at the closed file boxes that hold his past and Derek’s too, tangled up in ways they didn’t even know at the time, and taps his fingers on his knees.

He jolts a little every time he hears a car pass.

When one stops, he fights the urge to vomit. The knock on the door makes him want to flee. He hears the door open, and his dad’s calm voice. The answering voices, cautious, subdued, make his eyes sting with tears.

“Stiles?” his dad asks.

Stiles forces himself to his feet, and then looks up.

Rafael McCall has more gray hair than he remembers. He was always a big guy, tall and broad, who carried himself with authority. He was an easy guy to hate, especially after his and Melissa’s divorce, and it was Stiles’s job as Scott’s best friend to hate him unquestioningly. Sometimes Scott hated him too, but he also had to carry the burden of loving him at the same time. Stiles was free from that, at least.

Looking at him now, Stiles doesn’t see a man he hates. He sees a man who lost his only child.

“Stiles,” Rafael says, and steps forward into the room. He reaches out tentatively and puts a hand on Stiles’s shoulder. Squeezes. “It’s so good to see you home.”

And the sentiment might even be true, but it’s a horrible thing for him to have to say, because his kid never came home.

Stiles swallows, and nods, and tries to hold back his tears.

And then he can’t, because Melissa is here too, and she’s smiling and crying at the same time, and Stiles knows her heart is breaking all over again, because his is too.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps out. “I’m so sorry.”

How can she hug him and pretend that a part of her doesn’t hate him for being the one who lived?

“Oh, sweetheart,” Melissa says, and she hasn’t called him that since his mom’s funeral. “Oh, Stiles.”

She’s wearing a blue blouse that Stiles leaves trails of tears and snot all over. He’s a fucking mess, and he wasn’t supposed to be. He was supposed to… bear their sorrow for as long as this took, like some sort of poster child for stoicism or something, not crack under the pressure of his own. Except the McCalls’ sorrow can’t be untangled from his. It’s not a separate thing. It’s takes exactly the same shape as Stiles’s heartbreak: a dark-eyed kid with floppy hair, a crooked jaw and a smile like sunshine.

Stiles sits back down on the couch, with his dad beside him. Melissa and Rafael sit opposite them.

“It was my idea to go into the Preserve that night,” Stiles says, when he thinks he can more or less trust his voice not to fail him. “We saw—”

Half a dead woman.

Kate Argent, her golden hair spread out like a halo.

“I don’t…” He clears his throat. It’s easier to talk when he’s looking at his shoes, and not at them. “I don’t even know where they came from. I don’t know how we got split up. I thought Scotty got away. I thought he was okay.” The tears have started again, this time accompanied by a thumping headache. “I thought he made it home. I’m sorry.”

They hate him. They must hate him.

He wishes Derek could be here with him for this. He knows Derek is close by, listening, but he’s officially been Stiles’s home carer for a week now. No way in hell could Stiles get through this without blowing their cover story wide open if Derek was in the room with him. And Rafael McCall is still an FBI agent.

“We just wanted to see the body,” Stiles whispers. “I heard about it on the scanner. Thought it would be _fun_.”

“It’s not your fault,” Rafael says, his voice cracking. “You were kids. You didn’t make Scott do anything he didn’t want to do.”

He thinks he hates himself more than they can ever hate him. Because maybe they don’t get it. Maybe they can’t imagine how an omega kid could have bossed an alpha kid around like that. But Scott was so good natured, and Stiles took advantage of it all the time. He was always pushing Scott into doing dumb things. Always.

“Daddy?”

Stiles turns his head to see Ryan standing in the doorway, his fingers in his mouth. Then he looks at Rafael and Melissa, unsure of what he’s going to see in their expressions. Pity? Jealousy? Sadness? He’s got no fucking idea. Rafael closes his eyes briefly as Ryan trails into the room. Melissa watches him, eyes wide and shining with tears.

Stiles lifts Ryan onto his lap. “This is Ryan.”

Melissa leans forward like she wants to reach out and touch him, and Ryan shrinks back warily.

“Sorry. He’s not…” Stiles swallows. “He’s not good with strangers.”

Melissa nods, and folds her hands in her lap. “He’s beautiful.”

“His middle name is Scott.” Stiles can’t look them in the eye again. He hunches over, hiding his face against the top of Ryan’s head. “I wanted to… I was going to make it his first name, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t make myself say it every day.”

“He’s beautiful,” Melissa repeats through her tears. “Stiles, he’s beautiful.”

 

***

 

Maybe this is what healing is. Ripping a scab off over and over again until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Stiles doesn’t know. He’s not even sure how the visit by Melissa and Rafael ended. He thinks he zoned out or something.

“I think that stuff about closure is bullshit,” he says to Derek later. They’re lying on the bed. Derek is holding Stiles’s hand in his, tracing shapes on his palm. “I feel worse, not better.”

“Maybe that was their closure, not yours,” Derek suggests.

“Maybe.” Stiles blinks at the ceiling. “When do you think we get ours?”

“I think we’re working on it,” Derek says softly.

“Yeah, we’re working on it.” Stiles closes his eyes. “We’re getting there.”

That night he dreams of Scott and the dumb stuff they used to do. Video games and curly fries and driving around town in his old blue Jeep, his best friend by his side.

He wakes up with tears on his face, but a smile too.

Maybe this is healing.


	31. Less Alone

Parrish gets home one afternoon to hear a faint electronic buzz coming from the bathroom. He finds Derek leaning in the doorway, wearing the closest thing Parrish has ever seen to a smile on his face as he watches Stiles buzz the sides of his head. Ryan is sitting on the lid of the toilet, eyes wide as Stiles’s hair falls into the sink.

Stiles catches sight of Parrish in the mirror, and spins around. “Oh wow. I thought you were my dad for a second in that uniform. He had that same look on his face when I did this the first time too.”

Parrish shows Stiles the palms of his hands. “Hey, it’s your hair. Go crazy.”

“That’s pretty much what Dad said too,” Stiles tells him with a grin.

Parrish retreats back down the stairs. A few moments later the buzzing starts up again.

Parrish is halfway through preparing dinner when Laura arrives with grocery bags. She and Peter come over every evening for meals, and whenever they can during the day.

“I got the steaks John asked for,” she says, setting them in the refrigerator. “Is he back yet?”

“Not yet, but he might need them.” John’s go-to comfort food is steak and, after spending the entire day with Peter and a financial planner, Parrish is willing to bet he’s going to want one when he gets home.

“I also got this,” Laura says, pulling the box of hair dye from the grocery bag. “Stiles wanted it.”

It’s the kind of blue that doesn’t appear anywhere in nature.

“He’s in the bathroom,” Parrish tells her.

Laura pecks him on the cheek and heads upstairs. Parrish smiles and gets back to work on the salads.

 

***

 

The shower is still running when John and Peter get home. Everyone migrates to the living room until Stiles and Derek turn up for dinner. Laura and Parrish share a couch. John settles into an armchair, looking tired. Peter doesn’t look much happier. He paces up and down in front of the window, throwing John the occasional accusatory glance.

“What happened?” Laura asks, eyes narrowing.

“Apparently I committed a major social faux pas when I offered John a check to cover a gap in his finances,” Peter snarls.

Parrish winces.

“Don’t talk like you came wandering out of the woods yesterday,” John growls right back. “My finances are my business, and I’m not a goddamned charity case!”

“No, you’re _pack_!” Peter says sharply. “You are pack, and Stiles is pack, and Jordan is pack, and if you haven’t noticed that yet, you must be blind!”

Parrish freezes for a moment, and turns his head to meet Laura’s gaze. “I’m pack too?”

Her fingers curl through his. “Did you not realize?”

“Maybe you need to explain it to the humans!” John mutters, but even Parrish can tell most of it’s just bluster. “And it still doesn’t make me your charity case!”

“Okay,” Laura says. “John, if Peter offered you money it’s not because we see you as a charity case. It’s because you’re pack, _family_ , and that’s what family does. We help each other out.” She tightens her grip of Parrish’s hand. “Look, we have money, okay? With the life insurance…” She shakes her head. “Anyway, we’re not trying to buy you, John. We’re not trying to make you indebted to us. You’re our family now, and we want to help you.”

John is silent, his face drawn.

“Beacon Hills is our territory,” Laura says. “It’s Ryan’s territory too. We want you to stay, John. We want to help you stay. Please be a part of our pack.”

“It’s that easy, is it?” John asks gruffly. “You just decide we’re family, and it’s done?”

“I think that we deserve something to be easy for once,” Laura replies. “Don’t you?”

John sags a little. He closes his eyes and shakes his head slightly. Snorts out something that sounds a little like a laugh. “Yeah,” he says, opening his eyes again. “Maybe we do. But I’m not taking your damn money.”

“Deal,” Laura says, her grip on Parrish’s hand loosening.

“I’m gonna go check on those steaks,” John says.

Peter gets up and follows him.

“Pack, huh?” Parrish asks.

“If you want,” Laura says, holding his gaze. She has beautiful eyes.

“I do,” Parrish says. “But you hardly know me.”

“I know your scent,” Laura says, and leans in to press her nose against his cheek. “I know that you would never betray us.”

“Nobody can know that about another person.”

She leans back and looks him in the eye. “I know it about you.”

“Are you talking about pack, or are you talking about more?”

“From the moment I caught your scent I knew you could be my mate,” Laura tells him, and Parrish feels his heart skip a beat. “I didn’t think you’d want me though, once you knew the truth.”

“About Kate?”

“About wolves, about Kate, about the absolute shit storm you’d be signing up for.” Laura smiles slightly, and Parrish isn’t used to seeing her look so nervous. “But everything that’s happened, you’ve been there as a friend to me. So maybe you could be there as more than a friend?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “I think I’d like that. Mates.” He frowns suddenly. “Peter said… he said something about wolves and humans mostly producing human offspring though. Is that—” He catches himself. “I mean, I don’t even know if you want children, but you’re the alpha. You’d want your children to be wolves, wouldn’t you?”

“I do want children,” Laura says. “One day. And our children would probably be human. That doesn’t matter to me. Our pack was always a mix anyway. The Hale Pack already has its next leader.”

Parrish raises his eyebrows. “Ryan?”

Laura nods and smiles. “I know I’m asking something huge of you, and I’m not going to push you, Jordan. But whether or not you’re my mate, you’ll still be a part of the pack.”

“Family,” he says, and leans forward to brush his lips against hers.

“Family,” Laura echoes, and the sound of the word on her lips is like music.

 

***

 

“Grandpa! Blue, Grandpa! I’m blue!” Ryan calls. He rounds the corner into the living room, sees that John isn’t there, and heads for the kitchen.

“Did he—” Laura asks, eyes wide.

“Have a bright blue fauxhawk?” Parrish finishes for her. “Yes, he did.”

“The next Hale pack alpha is a punk,” Laura mutters, and then laughs. She stands up and holds down a hand to Parrish to pull him to his feet.

When they get to the hallway, Stiles and Derek are coming down the stairs. Stiles has the same bright blue hairstyle as Ryan is sporting. The same he has in the photographs in his missing persons file. The wild, disobedient, ne’er-do-well omega.

It suits him.

He’s smiling, pulling Derek along by the hand toward the kitchen. Derek’s smiling as well, and Parrish thinks _yes_.

Yes, this is his pack.

Yes, this is his family.

Yes, this is his future.

 _Yes_.

“Stiles? Really?” John asks from the kitchen. He appears a second later, holding a beaming Ryan. He raises his eyebrows at Stiles.

“I’m blue, Grandpa!” Ryan tells him, patting John’s cheeks to claim his attention again. “Like Daddy!”

“Yep, kiddo, you sure are. You and Daddy. Two crazy peas in a pod.” John smiles almost unwillingly, and reaches out an arm to pull Stiles into a hug as he tries to get past him. “You look good, son.”

“Being whoever I want to be,” Stiles mumbles.

John pats him on the back, smiling. “Good job, son.”


	32. Full of Light

The rain is pattering gently down when they reach the playground. Ryan is clinging tightly to Stiles’s hand on one side, and Derek’s on the other. The weather means the playground and the park it’s set in are largely deserted. There are a few people walking dogs, but there aren’t any other kids in the playground area.

The playground area is fenced off. The gate squeaks as they push it open.

“Okay?” John calls, leaning on the fence.

Stiles nods, his heart beating faster, while Ryan looks back at his grandpa worriedly.

This isn’t a big deal, right? Just the outside world, and a strange place. It’s not a big deal.

Derek leans down and picks him up. “Okay, Ryan. Do you want to try the slide?”

Ryan’s brows draw together.

Derek carries him over to the slide. It’s only small. Derek can easily reach the top without stepping on the ladder. “I’m going to sit you up here and—”

“No! No, Papa!” Ryan clings to him anxiously.

Derek exchanges a look with Stiles.

Stiles twists the string of his hoodie around his thumb. Okay, so they agreed before they came that they wouldn’t push Ryan if he didn’t want to play, but Ryan doesn’t know what playing _is_. He’s never done it. He’s never had that sort of freedom before.

So Stiles doesn’t want to push him, but—

“Out of the way,” he says. “Daddy’s going first!”

It’s a tight squeeze once he’s at the top, even for someone as lanky as Stiles, but he manages it. Sits himself down at the top of the slide, pushes off, and gets a wet ass for his trouble. He slides to the bottom, his feet landing on the spongy surface the entire playground is covered in, and twists around to show Ryan he’s okay.

Ryan looks dubious.

“I’m going again,” Stiles says.

By the third time, Ryan is watching eagerly, and when Stiles holds out his arms for him. Derek passes him up.

“Ready?” Stiles asks, settling Ryan on his lap.

Ryan makes a face.

“Wheee!” Stiles slides down again, somehow fails to catch himself at the bottom, and ends up lying on the ground with a startled Ryan still sitting on top of him. Stiles starts laughing, his whole body shaking, while Ryan stares down at him.

 _Laughing_.

His breath catches.

Has Ryan… has Ryan never seen him _laugh_?

What was there to laugh about? Most days it was hard enough to smile.

“Daddy?”

“I’m okay,” Stiles tells him, his laughter fading on the edge of his sudden rising panic. “It’s funny. I’m laughing because it’s funny, and I have a wet ass.”

Ryan’s answering smile is tentative.

Derek hauls Stiles to his feet. “Are you going again?”

“Again?” Stiles asks Ryan.

Ryan nods, and sticks his fingers in his mouth.

After a few more trips down the slide with Stiles, Ryan’s ready to try on his own. Derek sits him at the top, and guides him down safely into Stiles’s outstretched arms. Soon, Ryan is climbing the ladder himself and giggling as he figures out he can slide down headfirst on his belly.

In the end it’s the worsening rain that drives them away from the playground, and only once they promise a hopeful Ryan they’ll come back again tomorrow.

***

 

“Dad’s watching Ryan tonight,” Stiles says. “They’re having a sleepover in the living room.”

He knows Derek can tell his heat is close. Knows that Derek can smell it. Stiles should probably be embarrassed by that, but after explaining to his dad the reasons he wanted him to keep Ryan downstairs tonight…well, Stiles isn’t sure he could be embarrassed by much else after that, honestly.

“You sure?” Derek asks him, looking suddenly shy in the dim glow of the bedside lamp.

“Yes,” Stiles says. He’s never been more certain of anything in his life.

 

***

 

He’s terrified, really.

He’s only had sex once in his life, and that wasn’t heat sex.

“It’s okay,” Derek whispers to him, helping him shed his shirt. Derek hooks his thumbs into the waistband of Stiles’s sleep pants, and tugs them down gently. “You can trust me, Stiles. I love you. I would never hurt you.”

It’s the loss of control during his heat that he’s afraid of, but Derek’s never taken advantage of that in the past. Not even when that was the whole fucking point. It’s also the specter of Gerard Argent hanging over them wearing his death’s head grin, telling Stiles to be a good omega slut, to open his legs for the filthy animal, to fuck himself on that dog knot until he’s bred like the bitch he is. It’s harder than Stiles thought to see past that, to see _Derek_. To see Derek’s eyes, so full of love.

Derek strips, and sits on the bed with his back against the headboard. He holds out his hand to Stiles.

This is a position Stiles knows. The one they’ve passed every heat in before. Held close in Derek’s embrace while the fever tears through him. Derek’s hands closed around his wrists, while Stiles cries and ruts against him. Except this time…

This time Derek doesn’t stop him.

This time there are kisses and touches, and whispered promises between them.

This time Derek doesn’t hold him back.

This time Derek opens him slowly, his fingers big and hot inside him. This time Derek helps Stiles seat himself on Derek’s dick, and he’s so full, and it’s so good, and Stiles comes the second that Derek closes his teeth gently over the scar of his mating bite.

Derek’s knot swells inside him, and Stiles moans and kisses him, and holds his gaze for as long as he can, right up until he passes into the fever dream of his heat.

 

***

 

Stiles blinks slowly awake, unsure at first what pulled him from his sleep. It’s daylight. Definitely daylight. Everything aches in a weirdly pleasant way. Stiles reaches behind him to discover that the bed is empty. He hasn’t even got time to be upset by that before he hears murmuring behind the door: Derek’s low tones and Ryan’s bright little chirps.

The door creaks open.

“Daddy!” Ryan bursts inside, barely giving Stiles time to check the comforter is at least providing him with a little bit of modesty. “Pancakes!”

Derek comes in behind him, bearing an apologetic smile and a tray of pancakes. “Sorry we woke you.”

“Der, you never have to apologize for waking me with pancakes.”

Ryan clambers up onto the bed, and launches himself into Stiles for a hug. “I poured!”

Stiles looks to Derek.

“He poured the batter into the pan for me,” Derek says, the corners of his eyes crinkling when he smiles. “He was a big help.”

“Good job, Ryan!” Stiles tells him, and Ryan beams.

Derek sits down beside him on the bed, legs stretched out, balancing the tray carefully on his lap. “This is probably going to get messy, right?”

Stiles shrugs. “Well, we have to wash the bedding anyway.”

Derek’s blush is adorable.

Ryan settles into a gap he makes between them, and watches avidly as Derek cuts up the pancakes into bite-sized pieces. Then Stiles and Derek pick at them lazily while Ryan eats as many as he can as fast as he can.

Stiles isn’t sure if it’s because the pancakes taste so good and he’s being a normal little kid, or if it’s because one thing Ryan has learned is to eat everything he can while there’s food available, because there might not be any next time he’s hungry.

He decides, for now, that he’s going to believe the first one.

He’s going to believe it, and he’s going to make it happen.

They’re allowed miracles.

In the basement, Gerard Argent thought he was throwing Stiles to a monster, but that’s not what happened. That’s never what happened. He tortured them both and forced a mating bond on them, and Stiles and Derek took something dark and twisted and they made it good. They made it their shared light. The one thing Gerard could never control was the love they created, the strength. From the moment he forced them together they’d already beaten him.

And they’re going to continue to beat him, for as long as they live.

And, even when they’re gone, Ryan will continue to be the light that came from that dark place. He’ll continue to shine.

Stiles believes that.

They are miraculous.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go, you guys!


	33. Full of Love

“You sure about this?” Parrish asks, loading the last box into the trailer.

John grimaces. “Too late to change my mind now.”

Parrish wipes his hands on his jeans.

“We bought this house together,” John says, regarding the For Sale sign on the lawn almost wistfully. “We made a family here. Lot of good memories.” His expression darkens. “Lot of fucking awful ones too.”

“Dad!” Stiles yells, aggrieved.

“Rude!” Ryan yells, hitting the exact same pitch as Stiles.

Parrish snorts.

It’s taken eight months to get the house on Hale land rebuilt. Eight months of living together in cramped quarters in the old Stilinski house—Parrish and Laura moved into the garage after all, John took the spare room, and Peter…well, Parrish has his suspicions that Peter didn’t spend every night on the couch—and in those eight months Ryan has learned a lot of new words. A lot of them rude. To be fair, most of those were courtesy of Stiles himself, and not John.

Stiles and Ryan are doing a final spot check of the front yard. Stiles is carrying a few brightly colored plastic pots. Ryan is trailing after him with a trowel. Claudia Stilinski planted some of the flowers in the front yard when Stiles was little. He’s taking them with him to the new house.

It’s a big step, but despite John’s last-minute reluctance—John’s a proud man who will always dig his heels in whenever he worries he’s not pulling his weight financially—Parrish knows the new house is going to be perfect for them. The last eight months have proved they can all live together without too much friction, and the new house will provide them enough space not to butt heads too often. And Parrish knows that even if he argues with Peter sometimes about what to watch on TV, or if Laura complains about everyone else using all the hot water, or if Derek sometimes just needs to get the hell out of the house and go for a run, that the alternative— _not_ living together—isn’t something that anyone wants.

They’re family now. Pack. It’s more than Parrish ever knew he needed. And, now that he’s got it, he’s not going to let anyone take it away from him.

 

***

 

The new house is perfect.

They’ve been slowly moving in over the past few days, in a painstaking convoy back and forth from town. Now, carrying in the last of their stuff, Parrish can hardly believe it’s done.

 

***

 

The sunlight slants through the trees of the Preserve. It’s beautiful out here, and only twenty minutes from town. Parrish grabs a beer and goes to sit on the porch that wraps its way around the house. It’s not long before John joins him.

“I like this,” Parrish says. “It’ll be nice to come home and relax, and just sit out here and listen to the birds. It’s peaceful.”

“The campaign getting to you already?” John asks him, quirking a brow knowingly.

Parrish grimaces. “I don’t think I’m cut out for politics.”

“Well, I’m not much of a strategist, but I think running for sheriff unopposed probably counts as a sure thing,” John says with a grin.

Parrish smiles slightly. Yeah, he’s got this in the bag. He wipes a bead of moisture off his beer bottle with his thumb. “It’s been a crazy eight months.”

“Sure has.” John shakes his head slightly like he still can’t believe it.

Laura appears from inside. She tosses a bag of chips at Parrish, and he catches them.

“What’s this for?”

“Alpha instincts,” she says with a shrug. “I’m being a good provider. Grr.”

“Funyuns don’t count,” Parrish says, and nods toward the woods. “Go and bring me down a deer!”

Laura snorts, and sits down on the loveseat beside him. “Don’t even joke about that, Jordan. I’ll do it!”

“I take it back, Laura! I do not want a deer!”

John looks unconvinced. “Venison though?”

Parrish points at him. “Do not encourage her, John!”

John laughs, and heads back inside with his beer.

Laura reaches up to the collar of Parrish’s shirt, and slips her hand inside. It’s like the scar is magnetic. It draws her touch unerringly. Parrish closes his eyes as her thumb brushes the tender mating bite, feeling a rush of warmth flood through him. It’s a hundred different things he hasn’t learned to separate yet. Love, arousal, loyalty, pack, home, family, want, and _Laura_. Every single one of those things flowing together on the sound of her name in his mind: _Laura Laura Laura_.

“I love you,” she says, her beautiful eyes wide.

“I love you too,” he tells her, the words falling as easily as breath from his lips.

They sit together in the soft golden light of the afternoon as the shadows lengthen.

 

***

 

“We cooking tonight?” John calls out from the kitchen.

“Peter’s getting pizzas!” Stiles yells back from upstairs.

Parrish and Laura trail through the house, fingers tangled lightly together. The house still smells of new paint. Everything is clean and fresh, except for a strange strip of eggshell blue on the living room doorjamb. Parrish is so glad they managed to remove it without breaking it. Just a strip of eggshell blue, with black marks up the wall, and words written next to them:

Stiles, age 1.

Stiles, age 2.

Ryan, age 2.

Stiles, age 3.

And the newest mark: Ryan, age 3.

It looks good.

 

***

 

Ryan is fretting. For weeks he’s been excited about moving into a bedroom of his own. He got to pick the furniture and the bright colors and the room is filled with books and toys. But now, with evening drawing in, he’s starting to cling to Stiles and Derek. There’s a wobble to his lower lip.

“It’s okay, baby boy,” Stiles tells him. “When it’s bedtime, we’ll tuck you into your new bed, and we’ll put your night light on, but if you don’t want to stay there you can come and sleep with me and Papa.”

Ryan sucks his fingers and nods worriedly.

Derek leans in and kisses him on the top of his head. “You’re being very brave.”

“I want to sleep with you!” Ryan wails, his composure crumbling.

Stiles shushes him.

“What’s going on here?” Peter asks suddenly, appearing with a stack of pizzas balanced on one hand, and a cardboard box tucked under his other arm. “Little help?”

Parrish divests him of the pizza.

“Uh oh, Ryan,” Peter says.

Ryan twists around on Stiles’s hip to look at him questioningly.

Peter sighs dramatically. “I think I made a big mistake.”

Ryan pulls his fingers out of his mouth. “What?”

Peter sets the box down on the floor and gestures Ryan closer. Stiles sets Ryan down and Ryan scurries toward Peter, his tears forgotten.

“I think,” Peter says with another long sigh, “that if you’re going to sleep with Daddy and Papa, that I might need to take this back.”

Ryan looks from the box to Peter and back again, wide-eyed.

Peter’s little theatrical spectacle has reeled them all in, even Laura and John.

Peter raises his eyebrows. “I don’t think there’s room in Daddy and Papa’s bed for these.”

“What is it?” Ryan asks, agog with anticipation.

Peter smiles. “Why don’t you open it and find out?”

Ryan dives forward to pull the box open. He squeals with delight when two fat little Labrador puppies spill out, one yellow and one chocolate. “Puppy! Puppies! Daddy, Papa! Puppies!”

Both Derek and Stiles looked stunned.

“Jesus Christ, Peter,” John says at last. “Puppies, _really_?”

“You know me, John,” Peter says, his smile turning wicked. “I’m full of surprises.”

John rolls his eyes, but can’t stop the little huff of laughter escaping him.

 

***

 

Parrish checks the house is secure before he goes to bed. Okay, so werewolves might be able to hear any damn threat before it gets inside, but years of being security conscious can’t be undone that quickly. And shouldn’t be, in Parrish’s opinion. Despite Laura’s super hearing, he’ll still sleep better knowing the doors are locked.

Derek and Stiles are curled up together on the couch. They’ve fallen asleep in front of the TV. Derek’s arm is around Stiles, and Stiles’s head is tucked under Derek’s chin. Derek’s other hand is resting over Stiles’s abdomen protectively. Stiles’s textbooks are spread out on the coffee table in front of them. He’s been working hard to get his GED online.

Parrish heads upstairs.

Peter’s door is open, leaving a rectangle of light spilling into the hallway. Parrish glances into his room as he passes, unsurprised to find it empty. He passes John’s room next. The house is big enough and with enough spare rooms that there was really no reason for John and Peter to set up right next to each other. No reason except the obvious. The door is closed, but Parrish can hear the low murmur of voices from inside.

John and Peter might be mismatched on the surface, but who the hell is Parrish to say they shouldn’t try? Anyone who can keep a leash on Peter Hale deserves him. And anyone who can worm in under all the gruff layers of John Stilinski’s guilt and pride and grief deserves the same. And they’re not so different where it counts. They’d both do anything to protect the pack.

Ryan’s door is open. He’s asleep on his bed, his mouth wide open. He’s got one puppy wedged under his knees, and one curled up tight against his side. A literal puppy pile.

Parrish and Laura’s room in at the front of the house, wide windows overlooking the curving road out of the Preserve. Parrish opens the door, and closes it again behind him.

Laura steps out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and a cloud of steam. “Ready for bed, Sheriff Parrish?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, loving that glint in her eye. It’s the one that promises he’ll be tired as hell in the morning, but totally unable to regret it.

He’s got no time for regrets anyway.

He and the pack have got a future to build.

And from where Parrish is standing, it looks perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Thanks so much for reading, everyone, and wow, can we all take a minute to remember this came from a weird dream I had on cold medication? Yeah, I thought to myself, it'll probably be about five or six chapters...
> 
> Why do I even lie to myself like this?


End file.
